


for the common defense

by madasaboxofcats



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Angst, Episode: s04e11 If-Then-Else, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-01
Updated: 2016-11-18
Packaged: 2018-08-12 11:29:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 28,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7932940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madasaboxofcats/pseuds/madasaboxofcats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Martine stands above her, gun pointed at Root’s head and her finger on the trigger, but all Root can look at is Shaw, standing at the cage, gaping at her, silent. Shaw holds her eye contact, and it’s right then that Root really knows she’s going to die."</p><p>---</p><p>What if Root had taken the bullets in If-Then-Else? What if Shaw had been left to deal with the aftermath? A canon-divergent AU from 4.11 onward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This one took a village. Many, many thanks to andymcnope for her super typo-spotting skills and generally wonderful beta-ing and to jadesabre for kicking my ass in general and introducing me to this beautiful, terrible show. And I owe so very much to nihlmai for her constant, unfailing encouragement and for making this so much better than it ever would have been under my hand alone.

She knows the second that Shaw’s lips press against hers that the kiss is a distraction.  
  
There’s a moment where she almost gives in to it, gives in to the thump-thump-thump of her heartbeat and the warmth of Shaw against her, Shaw’s hands gripping her shoulders and holding her like she doesn’t want to let go (and Root knows why Shaw holds on the way she does, she _knows_ , but she wants so badly for this to be something other than what it is). She tries to pretend that this kiss is about them, about this thing between them that’s been building since “I kind of enjoy this sort of thing,” this thing that she wasn’t expecting and can’t control. She tries to pretend that this is enough.  
  
But in the end, she can’t and it isn’t enough, not even close.  
  
In the end, she knows that this kiss is a means to an end for Shaw, a distraction, a ploy.  
  
Root is in love, maybe, but she’s not stupid.  
  
She hates Shaw just a little bit for doing this, for giving her this moment before she tries to wrench it all away. But she loves her for it, too, loves the part of Shaw that knows her well enough to think that this would work.  
  
(It almost does.)  
  
The spin and the push happen almost simultaneously, and Shaw stumbles backwards a couple of steps before she finds her footing and her anger and Lionel finds Shaw’s waist. He really isn’t a match for her but he tries to hang on as Shaw throws elbows at his face, and Root does her best to convey her gratitude in the glance she spares him before she’s reaching up to close the grate.  
  
Shaw might have been proud, if the situation were different, might have been proud to see Root using what Shaw had taught her: catch them off-guard, push them off balance, take them down.  
  
But there’s no pride in Shaw’s face now.  
  
She breaks away from Fusco as Root throws the latch on the door, and her voice is low and harsh and threatening – _Root, what the hell are you doing? What the fuck? Get your ass back in here._ All Root can do is smile because what can she say that will make what she’s about to do any better?  
  
Shaw reaches to the back of her pants for her gun, like maybe she’ll shoot Root herself before she’ll let her walk into the line of fire, but it isn’t there. Root pulls the gun from her own waistband, where she’d stuck it after she swiped it from Shaw, and feels the weight of it in her hand. It’s lighter than the guns she prefers, more compact, but she’s used it before – she almost smiles at the memory of “Okay, that was hot” – and it’ll at least give her a fighting chance.  
  
Shaw’s fingers are threading through the grates, knuckles white, like she’s trying to pry apart the metal with her bare hands to get to the button, to Root. She’s stopped talking – maybe she has nothing to say, maybe she knows that Root won’t listen anyway – and she stands there, seething.  
  
Root can’t help touching her one more time – her fingers to Shaw’s knuckles – before she turns and charges toward the button on the wall.  
  
The Samaritan agents’ footsteps echo in the hallway, executioners marching towards the guillotine, and for a second they are all she can hear. Two men in front, and Martine behind them, all of their guns drawn and firing.  
  
She lifts Shaw’s gun and fires off three rounds, not stopping to see if she hit anything. Stopping Samaritan isn’t the priority here – when did that become the case? When did _she_ start to matter more than Her? – and she can’t really bring herself to care about anything other than hitting that button.  
  
It’s only when she hits it that she glances back at Shaw, still standing at the grate as the elevator doors begin to close.  
  
When Samaritan’s first bullet hits, she tries not to cry out. When the second tears through her stomach, she can’t help it.  
  
She meets Shaw’s eyes just before her head hits the ground.  
  
She wants to say, “I’m sorry,” because Shaw must be so, _so_ angry, but the words don’t come. The heat in her gut radiates outward, taking her breath, and she can barely think let alone speak.  
  
Martine stands above her, gun pointed at Root’s head and her finger on the trigger, but all Root can look at is Shaw, standing at the cage, gaping at her, silent. Shaw holds her eye contact, and it’s right then that Root really knows she’s going to die.  
  
The last things she hears before the darkness takes her are a final pop from Martine’s gun and the Machine’s voice in her head, frantically calculating and recalculating her practically non-existent chance of survival.  
  
\-----------------------------------------------------------------------


	2. chapter 1

\---

  
_While policymakers are adamant that yesterday’s flash crash was just a “technical glitch,” citizens of New York are dubious._  
  
_“How are we supposed to trust anything they say, after all of that Northern Lights business?” asked Maria Lopez, who owns a jewelry store in Queens. “My husband and I, we lost everything, our retirement accounts went up in smoke. What are we supposed to do? Yell at the government?”_  
  
_A handful of protestors did just that, standing outside the New York Stock Exchange this morning, shouting, “we are the 99%” for more than four hours until the NYPD managed to clear the scene._  
  
_National Security Agency representative Andrew Crosby released a statement early this morning. “What happened yesterday was not a terrorist attack. What happened yesterday was nothing more than a minor computer malfunction. We deeply regret the damage it has caused the American people, but we want to assure them that our team of technicians has corrected the issue, and that it absolutely will not happen again.”_  
  
_Wait. Hold on. This just in. Some Americans are not resting easy, turning to criminal means to uncover what they think the government is hiding. Check out this just-acquired footage of a masked man and woman breaking into a private security firm that, according to our sources, houses the surveillance material from the Stock Exchange._  
  
_It appears that the woman shot four people while her partner stole the security tapes. Both are heavily armed and should be considered dangerous. He is approximately 6’2”, broad shoulders. She is approximately 5’3”, thin, and carrying two assault rifles._  
  
_If anyone has any information about these two individuals, contact Detective Lionel Fusco with the NYPD who has taken the lead in this investigation._  
  
\---  
  
“I’m sorry, Ms. Shaw, but the rest of this footage has been corrupted.”  
  
She stares at the computer monitor, which is playing the same ten seconds on loop. The kiss with Root, Root spinning her around and shoving her back, over and over and over again. Like Shaw needed reminding that she fucked up.  
  
“Not good enough, Harold.”  
  
“I’m afraid I can’t change the core data in these files. There’s nothing to be recovered.”  
  
“Not. Good. Enough.”  
  
\---  
  
_More on the two masked individuals who stole video surveillance footage from the New York Stock Exchange yesterday._  
  
_The masked man and woman were spotted in a shootout at a private security contractor in Philadelphia. Three men are dead and one is in critical condition at Mercy Philadelphia Hospital. Six others were shot in the knees and incapacitated._  
  
_Gregory Lumpkin, one of the gunshot victims, had this to say regarding tonight’s attack:_  
  
_“They came out of nowhere, man. I was at my desk – I’m the night receptionist, keep track of shipments, deliveries, security stuff – and then they were there. Great big guns, the kind you expect if they were military or something._  
  
_“The dude, he asked me where the transponders were – our company, we have a bunch of GPS transponders to help cops track criminals and stuff. I told him, and then he said, ‘Sorry about this, can’t have you following us,’ before he shot me in the knee.”_  
  
_When asked about the female suspect, Mr. Lumpkin shuddered._  
  
_“She was different. Ruthless. I saw her shoot two of the guys who died – she didn’t hesitate at all, just killed them. One shot to the head for each of them, and then she kept going. When they came back, her and the guy, she stopped right in front of me – I was on the ground because my knee hurt like hell – and she just looked at me. I think the only reason she didn’t shoot me was because the guy grabbed her arm and told her they had to go. I’ve never been so scared of anything in my life.”_  
  
_Mr. Lumpkin shouldn’t sustain any lasting physical damage from the shooting. He was taken to the hospital and seen by an orthopedic surgeon who assures him that he should be able to regain most of his mobility. His psychological wounds, however, may never heal._  
  
_“I’ll never forget the way she looked at me. Dark eyes, cold. She looked right through me, like I wasn’t even there. Like I didn’t matter to her at all. Like all that mattered was whatever mission she was on.”_  
  
\---  
  
The first time she really breathes is when they’re halfway to Washington DC, flying over Philadelphia. Finch is still at the subway station, doing his nerd thing, and John is passed out on the other side of the jet they’d commandeered for this trip.  
  
Shaw should sleep -- she’s gotten maybe four hours total in the two days since the Stock Exchange – but she’s too angry to drift off, and trying to fall asleep without success will only make her angrier.  
  
So she looks out the window at the city lights below, and she breathes.  
  
Their plan is a shitty plan that will probably get them nowhere, but it’s all they have, so it’ll have to be enough, at least for now. Find Control, find Root, kill Martine and everyone else responsible for the Stock Exchange.  
  
Part of her wants to say “fuck it” and go back to New York because fuck Root and her stupid fucking martyr complex. Whatever is happening to her right now is her own fault and if she’s going to be all holier-than-thou, she can deal with the consequences of her actions.  
  
Finch tried to point that out, too – something about “Ms. Groves knew what was involved in this war, the risks she took to protect the Machine” – and Shaw told him to shove it because Root is one of theirs, and you don’t leave your own wounded on the battlefield.  
  
She’ll be pissed at Root later. Right now, she just needs to save her stupid ass.  
  
\---  
  
_Bonnie and Clyde are at it again. The masked duo first seen stealing surveillance footage in New York City has made their way to the nation’s capitol._  
  
_Police arrived on the scene of what appeared to be an auto accident earlier this evening. When they viewed video from the camera mounted on the streetlight, they saw a large truck collide into the driver’s side door of the victims’ vehicle. The driver – a small, masked woman – appeared to speed up before impact._  
  
_Upon exiting the truck, the two suspects approached the victims, and took multiple items from their vehicle._  
  
_The victims, two men in dark suits, did not wish to be identified or to make a statement._  
  
\---  
  
She stands in front of Control – ziptied to the chair that sits in the middle of the cage – for a full minute before either says anything.  
  
“Agent Shaw.”  
  
“Ma’am.”  
  
“I’d say it was nice to see you again, but there’s a terrorist on the loose because you shot me with that shoulder cannon.”  
  
Shaw shrugs. “Don’t care. Where’s Root?”  
  
“Root?”  
  
“You remember Root. Brown hair, slightly unhinged, deaf in one ear.” Shaw reaches out and touches Control’s ear, pulling it forward to look at the skin behind it, the place on Root with a long, pink scar.  
  
It wouldn’t be difficult to give Control an identical scar. Maybe she’ll remember Root then, when Shaw’s scalpel cuts into her, when the blood drips down her neck, when the sound leaves her right ear and she can only hear her own screams with her left.  
  
“Ms. May. Samantha Groves. Did something happen to her?”  
  
“Her name is Root.”  
  
Shaw stalks behind the cage to get her medical bag. They don’t have time for this pussyfooting bullshit.  
  
Reese circles around to take her place with Control. “Shaw’s cover identity was burned eight days after one of your ISA operatives, guy named Grice, saw her in the field. The ISA is working with Samaritan and Samaritan has Root.”  
  
Control is dismissive. “It’s got nothing to do with me.”  
  
“Well, the evidence tells a different story,” Reese continues. “We tracked down four Samaritan agents who were at the Stock Exchange. According to their vehicle GPS, they’ve been spending a lot of time outside your house in Georgetown.”  
  
“What are you talking about?”  
  
“Samaritan knows where Root is, and therefore, so do you.”  
  
Control makes this noncommittal _hmmph_ noise and Shaw is so done. She marches into the cage and stands next to John in front  
  
“Listen,” she snarls, “I don’t have time for this crap. You tell us where Root is, or I kill you. Got it?”  
  
Control doesn’t blanche, barely even blinks, and Shaw would tear her throat out right now if Root’s life didn’t depend on the information Control was hiding.  
  
“Where is Root?”  
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
“Bullshit.”  
  
“I’m telling you, Agent Shaw, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”  
  
Control tosses her head, blowing a piece of hair out of her face. It’s casual, like they’re at some summer picnic eating finger sandwiches and talking about stupid shit, and Shaw’s ready to take her the fuck out.  
  
She doesn’t though because the information Control has is more important than how pissed off Shaw is.  
  
“Do you remember Jason Wyatt?”  
  
“May 2011. He and two others were planning on blowing up Rockefeller Center.”  
  
John circles around behind Control, leaving Shaw to stand in front of her.  
  
“Yeah, him. Do you remember what I did to him?”  
  
Control doesn’t say anything, but Shaw knows she remembers. She had gotten a call from Hersch afterwards – “A little excessive on that one, don’t you think, Agent Shaw?” – and she is sure that he squealed to Control about every damn thing.  
  
She’d been with the ISA maybe six months at that point and she still was still high on Research, gunfire, and catching bad guys, and that day, the day where she got Wyatt, that was a good day. She got to dangle a guy off a building, watching him try to hold on to the ledge with the two fingers she hadn’t broken, plus she got to pick up a couple of Chicago style hot dogs on her way to the airport afterwards.  
  
Today is not a good day. Today is a day where Root is still gone (and who the fuck knows if she’s even alive as this point, but Shaw can’t, _won’t_ think about that, not yet) and Samaritan is still winning,  
  
“Don’t forget why you hired me,” she pauses a second before, “Ma’am.” It’s pointed and threatening – a name, a title weaponized – and she smirks a little when Control doesn’t have a quick response. “Killing you is not going to keep me up at night.”  
  
She looks down at Control. Control looks right back at Shaw, unwavering. In another world – one that didn’t involve Control trying to kill her multiple times, coming pretty damn close to killing Root, and now concealing information for Samaritan – Shaw might have admired her.  
  
“Now. Let’s try this again. Where did they take Root?”  
  
“I. Don’t. Know.”  
  
The anger that’s been sitting in the pit of her stomach flares up, blood pumping through her and pounding in her ears. She’s been able to ignore it, mostly, in order to focus on the mission. Do what needs to be done. Root needs to be found and rescued and there is no room for emotions, even anger, right now.  
  
But Control isn’t giving in and Shaw is _pissed_.  
  
Shaw grabs the scalpel from her bag and takes a step towards Control. She’s standing right over her now, next to her head. She’ll deafen her first – the least she can do for Root is avenge that particular grievance – and then make her scream until she tells what she knows.  
  
“You really want the hard way, huh? Fine. I can do the hard way.”  
  
She yanks the chunk of Control’s hair that is nearest to her right ear and cuts it off with the scalpel, tossing it aside. With the blunt end of the scalpel she traces the delicate patch of skin behind Control’s ear, runs it back and forth, taunting.  
  
“You tell me where Root is, or I will show you _everything_ I am capable of.”  
  
She twists her hand and the blade digs in. The scream Control lets out when the scalpel breaks her skin is almost satisfying, almost enough to tame Shaw’s anger. She presses a little harder, and smiles at the blood trailing down her fingers and wrapping around her wrist.  
  
There is a hand grabbing her elbow and she is yanked backwards.  
  
“Stop it! This is not how we do things, Ms. Shaw.”  
  
Finch presses a bandage to Control’s ear and glares at Shaw. She shrugs.  
  
“Maybe this is not how you do things, Finch, but this is exactly how the ISA does things.”  
  
“Yes, well. You are no longer with the ISA, Ms. Shaw.”  
  
“Whatever.”  
  
She stalks out of the cage. The fucking last thing she needs is to sit through another one of Finch’s bullshit lectures on “ethically responsible interrogation methods.”  
  
“Pardon her aggression,” Finch says to Control, “She’s trying to save the life of someone she cares about very much.”  
  
Control turns her head to talk to Shaw.  
  
“Agent Shaw, I’m surprised. I didn’t know you cared about people. I didn’t know you _could._ ”  
  
Shaw walks away.  
  
She doesn’t need to hear this crap either.  
  
John grabs her arm as she tries to walk past him, and meets her eyes with his own. She can’t go too far; they still have work to do here, work that is more important than her anger at Control.  
  
She shakes the hand off of her elbow and squares her shoulders, standing next to him, watching Finch. Finch tells Control about Root, about how she took bullets, sacrificed herself to save not only them but the whole damn planet, about how the loss of a friend is unbearable.  
  
“You think she’s dead.”  
  
Control almost looks amused at Harold, who squirms under her gaze.  
  
“You think Ms. Groves is dead and you don’t have the guts to tell them.”  
  
Finch turns around and looks at Shaw like he wants to apologize, like she didn’t already know that he thought Root had died in that basement. But she had seen it in the way he moved after they got out of the elevator, the way his shoulders slumped with resignation, the way he hesitated when Shaw insisted they go back once they’d reloaded their guns.  
  
She hasn’t gotten a read on John yet, can’t tell if he thinks there’s a chance Root is alive, or if he’s indulging Shaw, supporting her the way she’d supported him after Carter had been killed. It doesn’t matter either way, really. He’ll keep looking as long as Shaw does – they are a team, they act as a team, and she’s grateful she can count on that.  
  
“You don’t know that, Finch,” John says, looking at Shaw, then Harold. “The surveillance footage from the stock exchange was unreadable.”  
  
“Why does everybody keep talking about the stock exchange? What does any of that have to do with Samantha Groves?”  
  
Finch launches into an explanation of Samaritan and the Stock Exchange and why they’re all there. Shaw only half-listens to what he’s saying. She watches Control, who sits back, frowns, scoffs.  
  
She believes her when Control says she doesn’t know anything.  
  
It might be the first time she’s believed Control about anything.  
  
She hears the intruders before she sees them. Taking her gun in hand, she goes to the left and John covers the right.  
  
Party time.  
  
If Harold had been right when he was setting this whole thing up – and when is Harold ever wrong about this shit? – there should be six ISA agents coming to rescue Control, including the one planted by Samaritan. Her job is simple: hold them off long enough for Harold to do his computer whiz thing, then get out of there.  
  
There are three agents in her immediate line of sight, and she shoots four times before ducking down to avoid the rain of bullets that followed. She doesn’t need to shoot anybody – not today, not them – she just needs to keep everybody busy.  
  
John is behind her somewhere, probably doing something that’ll tear open the stitches on his shoulder wound. She’ll grumble at him later about having to sew him back up, and maybe they’ll both feel normal for a minute.  
  
She stands again and fires off three more shots.  
  
The longer she shoots, the more she has to fight against the hope that threatens to invade her. Harold said he needed eighteen seconds to upload the bug. Eighteen seconds to ferret out the Samaritan double agent embedded in the ISA. Eighteen seconds to get some information on what happened to Root.  
  
“How’s it hanging, Harold?” she grunts between bouts of gunfire. She’s only got two extra clips in her waistband, and she’s pretty sure the ISA agents shooting at her have more ammunition than that.  
  
_A gun is useless without bullets, Shaw_ , an instructor had told her once during a drill, when her weapon clicked instead of banged. She’d punched him in the nose and told him that fists are just as useful as guns if you know how to use them.  
  
“Almost there, Ms. Shaw.”  
  
She glances over her shoulder at John. He’s on the ground, pummeling some dude, and she thinks that maybe this isn’t all for show, maybe he does give a shit that Root took a mess of bullets to keep them alive. Maybe he feels the debt that exists somewhere in Shaw, too, underneath the rage and concern.  
  
“Mr. Reese, Ms. Shaw, it’s done.”  
  
With two quick shots in the general direction of her group of ISA agents, she runs over to John. He throws one last punch at the guy on the ground – it takes a second for Shaw to realize it’s Grice – before he is up and running towards the door. They only stop running when they can see the outside. John slumps and stumbles and Shaw throws an arm around his waist, noticing that the bloodstain on his shirt that is bigger than it was when they went in. She holds him up and they walk together out of the building.  
  
Harold and Lionel stand in the alley, waiting for them.  
  
Harold looks right at her when he speaks. “We got something. What, I don’t yet know.”  
  
Shaw’s throat is too tight to speak. She nods.  
  
It’s Fusco that says, “Let’s get out of here,” and she climbs into the back of his car without making a single comment about the layer of hamburger wrappers that litter the floor.  
  
All she can think is that Root might be alive and they might be able to save her and that is all that matters.  
  
\---  
  
(Control’s voice echoes in her head later, when they’re in the car heading toward something that might be everything but that might not be anything at all – _I didn’t know you cared about people. didn’t know you could_ over and over and over again.)  
  
\---  
  
Harold calls three hours into their drive and tells her to turn around.  
  
“What the hell, Finch?”  
  
John, who has been drifting in and out of sleep in the passenger seat next to her, starts awake, looking at Shaw with his eyebrows knitted together and she knows he wants to know what’s going on. She keeps her eyes on the road. It’s only another hundred miles or so, and if Finch will shut up and let them keep moving, they can be there in less than an hour and a half.  
  
He prattles on about her cover, about Sameen Gray – _can’t believe this didn’t occur to me before, with all of the excitement about Root I suppose we all forgot, you really must turn around Ms. Shaw before you get yourself killed_ – and she tries to ignore him and focus on the road.  
  
Maybe Finch had forgotten that her cover was blown, but Shaw hadn’t.  
  
“I implore you, Ms. Shaw, let Mr. Reese handle this on his own. Sameen Gray has been compromised and we can’t risk another loss.”  
  
Shaw’s grip tightens on the steering wheel and she presses a little harder on the pedal.  
  
“She’s not dead, Harold.”  
  
The basement had looked like a warzone when they had gotten there. Shell cartridges littered the floor, some from Root’s gun (Shaw’s gun, really, but who’s keeping track), some from Martine’s. Bloody footprints smeared across the otherwise-clean linoleum and Shaw tried for several minutes to make a coherent story out of the map of smudges and red streaks – had Root walked out of there in her expensive-ass boots, had Samaritan taken her somewhere, where had they taken her?  
  
There had been so many signs of struggle, of destruction, but it had been empty. No Samaritan, and no Root.  
  
If Samaritan had killed her, they wouldn’t have bothered cleaning up the body. Martine is a hunter. She would have left Root in the basement, her brain splattered on the floor, blood congealing around her torso. She would have put Root on display like her prize kill, making sure that Shaw saw her before Samaritan’s clean-up detail arrived.  
  
Root is the Machine’s Interface. Samaritan must have found a use for her, a reason to keep her around.  
  
Shaw tries not to think about what that use might be, what they might be doing to her in order to get what they want from her. As long as Root is alive, they can deal with the rest later.  
  
(As long as Root is alive, they can deal with anything.)  
  
“I most certainly hope you’re right, but the fact remains that you’ve been exposed. It isn’t safe for you to be out in broad daylight, and it isn’t safe for us.”  
  
He’s right. She doesn’t want to hear it, but he’s right.  
  
Root would kick her ass if she got herself killed by being careless on a rescue mission.  
  
“I have a hat. And Samaritan has Root now, what does it need with us? She’s enough of a handful to keep them busy for a while.”  
  
John shrugs next to her like he thinks she’s got a point, like what have they got to lose anymore? He’d take the risk if she asked him to, stand next to her out in the open, practically daring Samaritan’s operatives to come after them.  
  
He’s a good friend. A better friend than he is an operative, maybe, because it really would be stupid to let Shaw play a full role in this mission, but he seems to be okay with it anyway.  
  
“A baseball cap may be enough to conceal your identity from street cameras while you’re in the car, Ms. Shaw, but once you arrive in Maple, you’ll need to figure out something more sophisticated to keep your face away from Samaritan’s prying eyes. Maybe they do have what they need in Ms. Groves, but we certainly can’t afford to think that way. There’s too much at stake.”  
  
He’s thinking about his stupid Machine and fuck that shit. She’d save Root over a computer any day of the week. The Machine can be rebuilt. Root can’t.  
  
“I’m not taking the bench on this, Finch. I can’t.”  
  
She thinks about Root, about her sad smile as she lie on the floor of the Stock Exchange, looking at Shaw like dying for her was supposed to mean something.  
  
“Then you’ll need to find a better way of hiding yourself.”  
  
Shaw hangs up the phone and presses her foot to the accelerator.  
  
\---  
  
She ends up wearing some old Founder’s Day costume, complete with a tangled blonde wig and a mask and she adds to her mental list of “reasons to torture Samaritan” because this is ridiculous.  
  
John had made her pull over when he saw them – a man, a woman, and a photographer in front of a house, attempting to recreate American Gothic but with sewing crap instead of pitchforks. She’d stayed in the car, ducked her head, and tried not to be noticed.  
  
A few minutes later, he’d shoved the clothes through the driver’s side window before walking around to the passenger side and getting back in the car. “Meet Spinning Jenny Whitlock, the founder of the textile mill that built Maple.”  
  
She sorted through the things on her lap – skirt that was at least four inches too long, peasant-blouse thing, apron, possibly the ugliest shoes she’d ever seen, low quality mask and wig. She glanced over John’s shoulder, towards the farmhouse.  
  
“What’d you do with Mom and Pop?”  
  
“They felt the sudden urge to take a nap.” He paused, like he was thinking about elaborating but decided against it. “Should buy us a couple of hours.”  
  
To his credit, John didn’t laugh at her when she put on her Spinning Jenny outfit, and his only response to the whole thing was a smirk when the stupid mask covered her face and the plastic-y blonde hair fell in her eyes.  
  
Now, she adjusts her wig as she marches towards the police station, trying not to trip over the hem of the skirt, John trailing slightly. The mask is stifling. She can feel her hair clinging to her face as sweat slides down from her forehead.  
  
Part of her wishes she hadn’t been so pissed at Root during that bear costume thing. Shaw missed out on some prime opportunities to make fun of her. Because really, no self-respecting sober adult puts on a costume outside of a Halloween party.  
  
Root is going to owe her big time for this shit.  
  
“Who the fuck gets a mask made of some manufacturing chick anyway?”  
  
John shrugs and says, “small towns,” like that explains everything.  
  
Shaw looks around. People in hats and scarves huddle around booths with apple cider and hot chocolate and probably half a dozen varieties of pie. Some of them carry little American flags and Shaw wants to throw up in her mouth a little at the small town picturesqueness of the whole thing.  
  
“I can’t believe I actually miss the makeup counter,” she yanks open the door to the station, which looks more like somebody’s old house than a serious police station but whatever, nobody asked her.  
  
A young deputy looks up when the come in, then furrows his brow when he takes in Shaw’s outfit. “Spinning Jenny? What can we do for –“  
  
“We need to see your security tapes from the road going into and out of town.”  
  
There’s no point trying to beat around the bush. It’s been 67 hours. There’s no time for that crap.  
  
“…what?”  
  
Shaw gets in his face.  
  
“Look, he’s NYPD,” she points to Reese, “I’m a concerned citizen and a big law enforcement supporter. Just get us the tapes.”  
  
The kid looks confused – probably understandably so given that he’s being accosted by a masked pseudo-historical figure – and Shaw waits for the point when he decides that she and John are somebody else’s problem.  
  
“You’ll have to talk to Wick.” He turns and shouts into the other room. “Chief!”  
  
A tall, balding man saunters out of the back room. He looks her up and down before nodding his head once and saying, “Molly.”  
  
He looks at Reese, who pulls out his badge.  
  
“John Riley, NYPD.”  
  
The Chief crosses his arms. “What the hell brings NYPD here? And why are you with him, Molly? Don’t you have a photoshoot with Mrs. Olson’s second graders at 11?”  
  
Shaw doesn’t say anything. She considers kneecapping him.  
  
“I’m investigating a homicide,” John offers and the Chief visibly stiffens.  
  
“Nothing like that happens here in Maple.”  
  
“Maybe not, sir, but it does happen in Brooklyn. I’ve been following a truck – big 18-wheeler up from New York. We think it has a body in it.”  
  
Shaw clenches her jaw.  
  
“I know the truck came into Maple but don’t know what happened to it from there.” John looks down at her and smiles. “Molly here has been kind enough to show me around your town.”  
  
The Chief barks a laugh and winks at Shaw. “That’s our Molly. Always looking to show a man a good time.”  
  
John doesn’t react. “The surveillance.”  
  
“Come on, then.”  
  
He walks back into the room he came from and Shaw and Reese follow, a couple of steps behind.  
  
“You can’t shoot him just because he’s a creep, Shaw,” John mutters under his breath.  
  
“Yeah, but I can think about how much fun it would be.”  
  
Chief Fat and Bald bends over the computer and clicks some things. “I don’t really look at this stuff much – it’s mostly there as a deterrent, you know, keep the kids from getting reckless on the road.”  
  
He hunts and pecks until video footage pops up on the screen. “What dates do you need?”  
  
John looks down at his watch. “The last three days or so. I’m looking for a large, white truck with an eagle figure on the front.”  
  
John moves in front of the computer and taps his ear, taking instructions from Finch, who launches right into tech speak the second John opens up the comm link. The Chief’s eyeballs look like they’re going to pop out of his head when John starts typing, like he’s never seen anyone type so fast. He’s probably never used a computer for anything other than Facebook and downloading excessive amounts of bad porn.  
  
He sidles up next to Shaw, who leans against a table near the window while John works. “You can take that mask off in here, Molly. You know I know what’s underneath it.”  
  
Shaw can feel his eyes running up and down her body. She’d be willing to bet good money that he had no idea what was under Molly’s mask or anything else, that he was one of those losers still living in his mom’s basement, spending a lot of quality time with his right hand and a box of Kleenex.  
  
John looks back at them. “Chief –“  
  
“Please, call me Wick.” He’s speaking to John but he leans in towards Shaw, leering, and she has to fight every impulse in her body that tells her to punch him. He’s got access to information that could lead them to Root, and that’s more important than Shaw’s low tolerance level for assholes.  
  
(She can’t think about Root too much right now, can’t think about how close they might be to finding her and ending all of this bullshit. There’s a mission to focus on, steps to be taken, orders to follow, and she can’t, _won’t_ let herself be distracted by the outcome they seek.)  
  
“Chief Wick, I need to see your hard backups. There’s some damage to the footage here.” The previously-clear image on the screen is marred with blue streaks. She can’t tell what’s behind the blue, and by John’s furrowed brow, he can’t either, but whatever it is must be important enough that Samaritan would want to hide it because she’s sure that this isn’t some innocent technical glitch.  
  
“The DVDs are locked in storage.” He barely looks at John as he tosses him a ring of keys and gestures towards a tall, green locker in the corner of the room.  
  
While John strides over to the locker, Wick scoots a little closer to her, so that his thigh is pressed up against hers and his breath, which smells like beer and menthos, is in her ear. “C’mon, Molly. Get a drink with me. Tom will never have to know.”  
  
His hand sneaking around her waist is the last goddamn straw.  
  
When he’s on his back, on the floor, with the heel of her ugly-ass colonial shoe digging into his sternum, he looks a lot less lecherous and she smiles a little.  
  
“Touch me again, I will break you. And not in the fun way.” She doesn’t care that she probably doesn’t sound like Molly-cum-Spinning-Jenny, or, for a second, that Samaritan might pick up on Molly-cum-Spinning-Jenny’s newfound martial arts skills.  
  
His eyes widen as she leans down and grabs his collar, pulling him up towards her a little. They close when she slams his head onto the ground.  
  
John finishes in the storage cabinet, takes one look at the passed-out police chief and circles around Shaw.  
  
“I never thought I’d have to say this to you, Shaw, but you’ve gotta be more careful.”  
  
Finch pipes up. “We’ve been over this, Ms. Shaw. Violence is only going to attract attention that we most certainly do not need right now.”  
  
“Well I most certainly did not need his hand up my ass.”  
  
Finch doesn’t really have anything to say to that.  
  
Silence settles among them while Reese pops the hard backup DVD into Chief Wick’s computer and waits for the footage to load.  
  
The computer whirs and whirs and this had better fucking work.  
  
The video pops up, John pokes around at it, and then stops, standing aside so Shaw can see the image of the white truck and the silver eagle on the screen. Her stomach drops and she pushes the hope down, down, down because she knows how dangerous it can be.  
  
It creeps in anyway because hope is an asshole and Root might be alive, might be _here_.  
  
“You found the truck.”  
  
“It entered Maple and never left. If that truck had Root in it, there’s a chance she’s still here in town.”  
  
Shaw is halfway to the door before she realizes that John didn’t follow her. He’s still standing over Wick’s unconscious body.  
  
“Hang on, Shaw. We’ve gotta do something with this guy.”  
  
She looks around the room. Storage locker is too small, the evidence room would probably work but it’s across the hall and she’s pretty sure she saw a couple of cops playing cards near there when they came in.  
  
“Shove him under the desk. It’s not like Spinning Jenny can be seen dragging a body around town.”  
  
The Chief is about as heavy as he looks and it takes them a solid 30 seconds to cram his dead-weight body into place. Shaw gives him a kick to the gut for good measure.  
  
John walks over the doorframe, and looks back at the desk. “That’ll have to work.”  
  
Shaw smiles. “Root would have brought a duffel bag or something to shove him in.”  
  
Root is nothing if not Boy-Scout-level prepared for violence and destruction. It’s one of the things Shaw likes best about her. Not that she’d ever admit it to her, really, because Root’s ego is inflated enough as it is, with the whole “voice of god” thing, but whatever.  
  
John shakes his head. “If you were missing and anyone got in the way of her finding you, the only bag that guy would see would be the one brought by the coroner.”  
  
Shaw doesn’t have anything to say to that.  
  
\---  
  
She smells it before she sees it.  
  
In medical school, the coppery tang made her feel powerful, as close to alive as she got when her own life wasn’t on the line. It was triage. It was her rotation in the ER, it was wounds bleeding and bleeding and bleeding no matter how much gauze covered them or how much pressure she applied, it was one person bleeding out while another came in with a seizure or a heart attack or a bullet to the gut.  
  
It was the promise of something broken that she could fix.  
  
(And outside of med school, in dark rooms and beneath sheets, it was the promise of something else, the flash of pain-pleasure that arched her back and made her feel like she belonged to the world, grounded, if only until the bleeding stopped.)  
  
The scent of blood now stops her cold, her feet frozen in place at the back of the truck that was supposed to end all of this.  
  
There’s copper in the air and her feet won’t move.  
  
Reese strides farther into the truck, and when he doesn’t say anything, she knows. (She _knows_.)  
  
“She’s dead.”  
  
The hollowness bounces around inside her chest and not for the first time, Shaw is glad she doesn’t feel things like normal people.  
  
But John shakes his head and the bouncing stops. “She’s not here. But the blood, Shaw…”  
  
Her feet find their mobility again and she strides up to where he stands, in front of a metal table, a bone saw, and light-colored rags swimming in dark red puddles. She runs a finger through the nearest puddle, pulls it back almost immediately.  
  
“It’s cold.”  
  
She looks at the table. Six feet long, four feet wide. A lip approximately two inches deep. The southwest corner near the bone saw has the largest pool of blood so she looks and she calculates. Inches to ounces to pints.  
  
“There’s a lot of blood, Shaw.”  
  
She doesn’t know what he’s trying to do, talking in that low, calm voice of his, doesn’t know if this is pity or reassurance or sympathy, if he’s trying to encourage her to quit or to keep looking.  
  
“Not too much. She could still be alive.”  
  
She’s quiet, too, like John is. Like if she says it too loudly, it won’t be true.  
  
She picks up the bone saw. It’s heavy in her hands, comforting and familiar and unnerving all at once. Neuro had been her favorite rotation. Neuro and cardio. Fixing the things that matter most.  
  
“They tried to keep her alive,” she murmurs because it’s true. There are bandages and sutures and medical tape, things meant for fixing, not destroying. She spots a kidney-shaped metal tray, a pair of forceps and three spent rounds clatter around when she picks it up. She takes one of the bullets between her thumb and forefinger and examines it.  
  
She remembers the way Root’s body twisted when the first bullet hit her, remembers it folding in on itself, crumpling to the ground. Her right side was hit first, then her left. Shaw’s position at the grate hadn’t given her a great view, as far as seeing the angles of entry, figuring out what may have been hit, what Samaritan may have been trying to fix here in this stupid, unsterilized truck.  
  
She hadn’t been able to see Root’s injuries in part because of her angle, but more because it was Root’s face she had looked at, Root’s eyes as they closed.  
  
“Shaw.”  
  
She turns her head sharply back to John. Right. Focus.  
  
John talks again. “Maybe they were trying to save her, but this doesn’t look good.”  
  
Harold pipes in. Shaw had forgotten that the comm link was open, that he had been talking to them right before they opened the doors to the truck.  
  
“I’m so sorry, John. Sameen.” He says her name like it’s a separate sentence, like it means more, like he knows that if Root turns up dead, Shaw is the only one who will care.  
  
It makes her mad if she thinks about it too much. Mad that Root has done so much for them, saved their asses so many damn times, and Finch still treats her like an outsider, like someone who can’t be trusted.  
  
It makes her mad that Root sacrificed everything for them, and no one will mourn for her. Finch and Reese won’t because they don’t give a shit, and Shaw can’t, not in the way that Root deserves.  
  
(Not in the way that Root would grieve for her if she had been the one turned into Samaritan target practice in that basement.)  
  
“Shut up, Finch.”  
  
Finch’s tone changes from that sympathetic crap to something more business-like. “I’ve hacked the hospital’s servers. No one has been admitted with Ms. Groves’ injuries, and there doesn’t appear to have been any brain surgery performed in at least six weeks.”  
  
“We need a sample.”  
  
John nods, reaching into the medical bag left behind and pulling out a tube. He passes it to her, and she begins to fill it, her hands steady and her grip firm.  
  
It may not even be Root’s blood, but thinking that way is dangerous, so she doesn’t.  
  
“What else?”  
  
She turns her back to the metal table and looks out of the back of the truck.  
  
“We need to find whatever passes for a neurosurgeon in this tiny-ass town.”  
  
\---  
  
The neurosurgeon knows nothing and Shaw wants to hurt him for being a fucking useless twit.  
  
But it won’t do any good, won’t bring them any closer to Root, so she doesn’t.  
  
John walks with her out the door, making sure the useless doctor is out of earshot.  
  
“Samaritan runs the factory.”  
  
She rolls her eyes.  
  
“No shit.”  
  
The leave to go find Mrs. Thompson and get some actual answers.  
  
\---  
  
Mrs. Thompson knows more-than-nothing but pretends she doesn’t and Shaw wants to hurt her for being a withholding asshole.  
  
Shaw does hurt her because it does get her somewhere, and Finch can go shove his self-righteous bullshit. Time is important – every minute they don’t find Root is a minute closer to finding her dead – and if she has to burn down half of this stupid, picturesque little town to get the answers she needs, so be it.  
  
He’s in her ear as she’s dragging Mrs. Thompson, who is cradling the hand with the broken fingers, to the car.  
  
“This is not the way we do things, Ms. Shaw.”  
  
“Yeah, well, it’s the way Root does things and she always seems to get her information a lot more quickly than you do.”  
  
There’s a pause for a moment and Shaw thinks that maybe he’ll finally acknowledge that she’s right and shut up.  
  
When he speaks again his voice is softer. “You’re honoring her.”  
  
It’s the same kind of pitying thing that John tried to pull in the truck. The anger rises up in her chest and she shoves Mrs. Thompson into the back seat a little more roughly than maybe she needed to.  
  
She huffs and gets into the driver’s seat. “Whatever.”  
  
“You are. Ms. Groves isn’t here, she may not be alive, and you’re coping by –“  
  
“Shut it with the Jungian shit, Finch.”  
  
He doesn’t say anything until they get inside the factory gates and he starts nagging at them about putting on their ski masks. Mrs. Thompson practically shakes in the passenger seat beside Shaw as she tells the guard to let them in, and maybe Shaw should regret hurting her, making her afraid, but she doesn’t.  
  
_I saw her, the brunette woman._  
  
It echoes in Shaw’s head over and over and over again.  
  
_I saw her I saw her I saw her._  
  
\---  
  
It takes approximately four minutes for everything to go to shit.  
  
The person lying in the bed isn’t Root, and Shaw’s world tilts sideways just a fraction. Everything looks more or less the same – the ground is still the ground and the sky is still the sky – but everything is different, too, and Shaw can’t find her balance without stumbling.  
  
It’s not Root.  
  
\---  
  
The text from Harold comes at 10:52 at night when she’s halfway through her fifth whiskey.  
  
_I would appreciate it if you would join me for Bear’s morning walk. Washington Square Park._  
  
She is in the middle of tapping out a sarcastic response about what he’d like her to wear – the Spinning Jenny costume or a ski mask in the middle of the day – when his second text comes through.  
  
_There will be a power surge at approximately 10am that will incapacitate the security cameras._  
  
Shaw downs the rest of her glass and deletes her text. Stupid, sensible Harold. Fuck him. Won’t even let her have the small pleasure of sending a snarky, asshole-ish text message.  
  
She needs more whiskey.  
  
The burn of the liquor down her throat reminds her of Kuwait, of an operative they lost on a particularly squirrely mission, a guy who had shown her more pictures of his kid than she ever really wanted to see, a guy who was decent and fair, and who had ended up as pink mist all over Shaw’s uniform. She drank for two days after that and picked bone fragments out of her hair for three.  
  
It reminds her of Cole, dead and labeled a traitor and of the powerlessness of being a dead woman with no voice.  
  
Shaw doesn’t generally drink to get drunk – she likes her mind clear and her reflexes sharp – but she tonight drinks until she is sleepy enough to close her eyes without seeing Root behind her eyelids, screaming and twisting and falling to the floor over and over and over again.  
  
\---  
  
Finch hands her Bear’s leash without comment and they walk for a solid 30 seconds before either of them says anything.  
  
“I sent you for nothing. I’m sorry.”  
  
Shaw doesn’t reply to that because there really isn’t anything to say. They saved some people, maybe, and that’s worth something, but it isn’t enough and Finch knows it.  
  
Bear stops to pee and Finch shifts a bit, angling his body to face her. When he speaks, his words come out hesitant, stilted, his discomfort palpable.  
  
“Ms. Shaw. Sameen.”  
  
Shaw raises an eyebrow and waits.  
  
“A few weeks ago, Ms. Groves requested that I give you a message in the event of, well, of something like this.”  
  
The anger towards Root that she has tamped down, pushed away as soon as they left the Stock Exchange so that she could focus on her anger towards Samaritan, focus on how to find her, rises up through her stomach like bile. Because how fucking dare she.  
  
How dare she do what she did, kiss Shaw and then make her watch as Root took bullet after bullet. How dare she think that Shaw would want to hear some posthumous message passed on through somebody else.  
  
Her jaw clenches and maybe she should just walk away before Finch has time to say whatever it is he’s going to say.  
  
Shaw doesn’t want to hear some grand declaration of love or whatever the fuck Root feels, not now, and not through Finch, for Christ’s sake.  
  
Root should have known that.  
  
“Although I regretfully did not give her the opportunity to tell me what that message was, I believe she wanted me to tell you –“  
  
“No.”  
  
She tugs on Bear’s leash and starts walking again, Finch trailing after her, struggling to keep up.  
  
“I’m sorry?”  
  
“She can tell me herself when we find her.”  
  
It’s several feet before she realizes that Finch has stopped in his tracks and when she does, she’s tempted to keep going because Jesus, she doesn’t need this shit right now.  
  
But she turns around and walks back to Finch, who is standing next to a row of benches and looking up at a surveillance camera.  
  
Shaw looks up, too.  
  
“The Machine knows. It knows where Root is.”  
  
Harold nods solemnly. “Yes, I suspect it does.”  
  
“And it hasn’t told you.”  
  
“No. It hasn’t.” He pauses for a split second, then his words come out in a rush, and Shaw knows immediately that this conversation is why he had her come out here. “Ms. Shaw, our only lead brought us to the brink of disaster. You and John came perilously close to being discovered. I care about Ms. Groves – Root – I do. But, if only for our own sake, we have to let her go.”  
  
He’s right – she knows he’s right – but this time, she can’t seem to make herself care.  
  
It’s funny, almost, how she’s ended up here, caring about Root even when it is messy and inconvenient and doesn’t make any sense. She might laugh about it if it didn’t piss her off so much.  
  
“We can’t just let them have her, Finch.”  
  
She tries to be forceful, but she’s pretty sure she sounds pathetic – some lovesick puppy dog that has lost all sense of reason, and she hates herself a little for it.  
  
“No one is suggesting we do, Ms. Shaw.”  
  
She huffs. “Bullshit. You think she’s dead. You have since we left the Stock Exchange.”  
  
“Ms. Shaw, I never said –“  
  
“Look, I get it, Finch. I don’t know either. I don’t know if she’s alive or if she’s dead or what.”  
  
She pushes back the images of Root lying on the linoleum, bleeding and bleeding and bleeding.  
  
“Hell, she probably is dead – Martine shot her what? Three times? That would’ve been a lot of blood loss, maybe more than Root could handle, and that’s not even taking into account what vital organs could’ve been hit.”  
  
Root lying on the linoleum, looking at Shaw with that sad little half-smile and then closing her eyes.  
  
“So yeah, she’s probably toast. But we don’t know for sure, and we owe it to her to find out.”  
  
Finch looks back up at the surveillance camera, like he’s waiting for it to give him all of the answers, to give him something to say that won’t sound callous.  
  
“Ms. Groves always knew that this would be her fate. That she would die to save the Machine. If she had accepted that, we need to as well.”  
  
“Yeah, whatever, but she didn’t die for the Machine, did she? She died for us.”  
  
She doesn’t say “she died for me,” even though she wonders if it’s true, if normal people really do love each other enough to give up their lives (if Root loved her that much).  
  
Finch doesn’t have anything to say to that.  
  
“Turn it on.”  
  
He looks surprised.  
  
“What?”  
  
She nods up at the lamppost above them.  
  
“Turn it on, Finch. Tell the Machine to turn on the camera or whatever.”  
  
“You know I can’t, Ms. Shaw. Samaritan –“  
  
She doesn’t let him finish. “You have two options. Let me talk to the Machine, or I will step out into the street and hail the nearest Samaritan agent like a cab on 5th Avenue. Either way, I’ll find out where Root is.”  
  
Finch sighs and takes out his phone.  
  
A red light appears on the camera, blinking at them.  
  
Shaw faces the camera.  
  
It occurs to her that she’s never addressed the Machine directly before. That’s Root’s thing. Even Finch’s thing. She follows the Machine’s orders, sure, but it’s not something real to her, not like it is to them. The Machine is what Control was before Control had a face.  
  
“Where is she?”  
  
The red light just blinks.  
  
“Tell me where she is.”  
  
Blink. Blink. Blink.  
  
“Listen – Root has done everything you’ve ever asked her to, and then some. You wouldn’t be here without her, none of us would. You owe her.”  
  
She’s angry but she won’t yell, won’t draw any more attention to herself than she already is, talking to no one in the middle of Washington Square Park. She keeps her voice low, and demands as best she can.  
  
“Tell. Me. Where. She. Is.”  
  
There’s a pause. The light doesn’t blink. Shaw’s heartbeat quickens.  
  
The phone rings.  
  
Finch beats her to the payphone and puts it to his ear. He pulls his notepad out his pocket and writes words she can’t really see. She cranes her neck.  
  
If this is all it took to get info on Root, she’s going to kick herself for not doing this sooner. The Machine loves Root, of course it does, and of course it wants to see her saved. Still, it could have come forward with information sooner, but who cares, as long as Root is still alive by the time they get to her.  
  
“Finch, what is it saying?”  
  
He finishes his scribbling, looks at her, and passes her the phone.  
  
_Sierra. Tango. Oscar. Papa._  
  
She doesn’t have to look at Finch’s paper to understand the Machine’s message.  
  
Harold talks, something about “maybe the Machine has a plan” and “for our own survival,” but she doesn’t really listen. All she can hear is the thudding of her heart in her chest, anger coursing through her like blood.  
  
Root gave everything for the Machine. It was her God, her teacher, her reason for living, and she has faithfully served the Machine for years, stopping relevant numbers, putting together complicated plots to defeat or slow or disable Samaritan that Shaw only half understood, and this is how the Machine repays her. By doing nothing when Root needs it most. By telling Shaw to stop, to give up, to let Root die.  
  
As angry as Shaw is at Root, at Samaritan, at Finch, her anger at the Machine surpasses all of it.  
  
“I believe we must reconcile ourselves with never knowing the truth. Otherwise our pursuit of it will consume us entirely.”  
  
Finch finishes speaking.  
  
Shaw walks away without saying a word.

\---


	3. chapter 2

_Her body thrums and surges, eyes rolling back into her head, her back arched into the heavy air. Sameen is above her, smirking like she’s won something (and maybe she has). Root bucks again, and it’s as much to startle Shaw, to wipe the smugness off of her face, as it is for the jolt that runs through her as her hips roll over Shaw’s thigh._  
  
_Her eyes close and open and they focus lazily on Shaw, who remains smug and unshaken, and she almost can’t believe they got here._  
  
_Tomorrow, they’ll be strangers – Shaw will work behind a makeup counter, and who knows who Root will be – and the whole damn planet will be under Samaritan’s thumb, and there is still so much that she doesn’t know about what they will wake up to._  
  
_Tomorrow belongs to Samaritan, but tonight, this last night of the world, is theirs. Tonight is hers and Shaw’s, and she’s going to revel in every second of it, treasure every piece of Shaw that Shaw will give her._  
  
_No, she never thought they’d get here. Not really._  
  
_She kisses Shaw again and she takes and takes and takes because it’s the end of the world and it’s_ theirs.  
  
_The Machine is silent in her ear and for once, Root is glad._  
  
_Instead of coordinates and code, she hears herself gasp as Shaw moves against her, and she hears Shaw’s breathing – mostly even but with the occasional hitch when they move a certain way. Instead of dropping everything to follow the Machine’s instructions – which she will do every single time – she can focus on this moment, on the tug-of-war that is sex between them._  
  
_Shaw brings a hand to her throat and Root gasps for breath._  
  
_A drop of sweat slides down her temple and she feels alive._  
  
\---  
  
The first time she wakes up, she thinks she might be dead.  
  
Nothing hurts and the room is white and she doesn’t believe in God or anything like that (she believes in herself and she believes in the Machine but never saw much use for metaphysics) but for a second, she wonders if maybe she was wrong about this whole thing.  
  
But she sees Greer and she sees the needle some nurse sticks in her arm and then she doesn’t see anything at all.   
  
At least she’s not dead.  
  
\---  
  
_How nice of you to join us, Ms. Groves._  
  
_Now._  
  
_Where is Harold Finch?_  
  
_Where is Harold Finch’s machine?_  
  
\---  
  
By the fifth time she wakes up, she wishes she were dead.  
  
If she’s dead, they can’t get any information from her.  
  
If she’s dead, they can’t find the Machine.  
  
But she’s not dead and that’s really not how this was supposed to go.  
  
\---  
  
_Good morning, Ms. Groves._  
  
_Oh. Can’t you hear me? Or should I be standing on your other side?_  
  
_What an interesting piece of hardware you have there._  
  
_Now. Tell me where Harold Finch is._  
  
\---  
  
When she wakes up the ninth time, she pretends to be asleep.  
  
It’s too much. It’s all too much.  
  
She doesn’t open her eyes.  
  
Instead, she pictures herself and Shaw at a bar in Miami.  
  
She pictures them eating steak in St. Louis and wonders what might have happened if she had taken Shaw with her instead of sending her to DC.  
  
They’ve never talked about who made the decision not to shoot the congressman.  
  
She tries to imagine steak that’s better than sex and to go back to sleep.  
  
\---  
  
_How very nice of you to join us again, Ms. Groves. I’m sure that we will have a lovely time getting to know one another._  
  
_Now._  
  
_Where is Harold Finch?_  
  
_Where is Harold Finch’s machine?_  
  
_You’re going to answer my questions eventually, Ms. Groves._  
  
_You know my Samaritan is going to win, don’t you? Don’t you see that it’s already beaten that which you so valiantly protect?_  
  
_You know this war ended when you gave yourself to us?_  
  
\---  
  
The twelfth time she wakes up, she accepts the fact that she’s alive and that she’s going to have to deal with Greer and Samaritan and the whole idea that the world as she knows it is going to come to an end because she let herself fall in love and then did something stupid and/or heroic.  
  
And she’s going to have to deal with the fact that she’d do it all over again if she had to.  
  
She dreams about Shaw a lot.  
  
When the needle slides into her arm and her world goes black, it’s Shaw, right there.  
  
Shaw shooting people, Shaw writhing underneath her, Shaw eating steak with her hands and smirking.  
  
Shaw twisting and falling under a hail of bullets in the basement of the Stock Exchange.  
  
Shaw with Bear, smiling like she’s happy and like the world is simple – just a girl and her dog.  
  
Sometimes, when she doesn’t dream about Shaw, she dreams about Her and about Harold and about the impending end of the world.  
  
She prefers the dreams about Shaw. The good ones, anyway.  
  
She doesn’t want to think about the bad ones.  
  
Root turns her head and looks around. Greer will be in here in a minute – it never takes long after she wakes up for him to show up – and she’s been keeping track of the changes in her room, trying to piece together what is being done to her here.  
  
It’s the same room, she thinks, as when she first woke up. White and sterile, a wall of mirrors that she assumes are two-way, a bright florescent light overhead. There’s a chair near the head of the bed, where Greer usually sits, and another chair near the end that is new.  
  
There’s a clock above the door. It’s 8:17, but there’s no way to tell if it’s day or night. There aren’t any windows, and she’s slept so much that time of day doesn’t mean much anymore.  
  
She’s been here a matter of days, probably, but it could be a week, maybe a week and a half. She sneezed once, the last time she woke up, and the pain tore through her gut like it had when the first bullet hit. The wound is still fresh enough to hurt, to tear, to send blood dripping down her side and onto the sheets. She’s been shot enough times to know how long these things take to heal, and yeah, it hasn’t been too long.  
  
In the time she’s been here, she’s wondered what Shaw and Harold and John were doing, how long they may have searched for her, whether they went back to the Stock Exchange and saw her blood on the floor, whether they followed whatever trail Martine may have left.  
  
They would have looked for her – Harold has too much guilt not to – but they would have stopped, too, when looking became impractical or when it got in the way of Her mission.  
  
And Root can’t think about Her, not right now, not while she’s here and alone. She can’t think about Her and everything she’s lost, everything she gave up when she ignored Her and ran towards that button.  
  
_(Evaluated probability of mission success. Asset: Analog Interface. Chance of survival: 0.0000284%. Outcome undesirable.)_  
  
_(Warning: anticipated actions of Analog Interface would likely result in death and/or mission failure. Outcome undesirable.)_  
  
_(Requesting Analog Interface return to safety.)_  
  
It’s quiet, it’s been quiet for a week, maybe ten days, and they have all abandoned her.  
  
Except for Shaw.  
  
Because Shaw cares, even if they don’t talk about it, even if she rolls her eyes and pretends not to. Shaw will probably kick her ass when she finds her, sure, but she cares and Root knows she will keep looking.   
  
“Contemplative today, are we, Ms. Groves?”  
  
Greer had slipped in quietly. She’d noticed him, but hadn’t turned her head away from the far wall. The less time she spends being forced to look at his ugly face, the less miserable she is. At least when Martine is here, Root has something nice to look at while she’s being interrogated.  
  
Blondes never were her type, especially not now that her type is basically limited to short, vaguely angry-looking Middle Eastern women, but she’d look at a pretty blonde over a wrinkly old dude any day.  
  
Greer is alone this time.  
  
“I do hope you had pleasant dreams.”  
  
He settles in his chair, places his black bag at his feet, and leans back.  
  
“I was very pleased to hear from the nurse that you are healing well.”  
  
She can hear the smugness in his voice and she wants to vomit.  
  
“As long as you’re careful not to rip your stitches, you’ll be ready fairly soon for some of our – what do you Americans call it? – oh yes. For our enhanced interrogation methods.”  
  
Stitches or no stitches, she’d punch him in his ugly face right now if she could.  
  
She tugs at the restraints around her wrists in the vain hope that they had loosened while she was sleeping. No such luck.  
  
“Now I know we’ve talked some about Harold Finch and you’ve been reluctant to provide any information about him or his machine. So today we are going to do something new.”  
  
She turns to look at him.  
  
‘Something new’ doesn’t sound good.  
  
But they weren’t really getting anywhere with a constant stream of “Where is Harold Finch’s machine?” and “I don’t know,” so it shouldn’t be too surprising that Decima would resort to other methods.  
  
“Today, Ms. Groves, I want to talk about _you_.”  
  
“Sorry, my dance card is all full.”  
  
He ignores her response.  
  
“Samantha Leigh Groves. Born July 22, 1979 to Lynnette Jane Groves in Abilene, Texas. No father to speak of, no grandparents or siblings. Just you and your mother. How old was she when she had you? Eighteen?”  
  
“Nineteen.”  
  
The reply comes without hesitation. Samaritan is a god, asking questions when it knows the answers. There is nothing she can give to them that they don’t already know.  
  
Nothing except for information about Her.  
  
Greer smiles. “Ah yes, that’s right. On her own at 17, sleeping with whatever man gave her the nicest trinkets, and ignoring the bruises they would leave. Pregnant with you at 18, working the night shift at Denny’s and doing whatever else she had to do to get by.”  
  
Root meets Greer’s eyes and says nothing. If he thinks he can shock her, tell her something new, he’ll be quickly disappointed. Lynette Groves was her first research project, the first thing she tried to debug, to fix. To heal.  
  
And when she failed, Root learned everything she could about why, about problems that are impossible to fix, about people whose code can’t be altered, who aren’t designed quite the same as everyone else.  
  
There’s nothing he can say about her mother that will surprise her.  
  
So she stares and stares and stares and waits for Greer to blink.  
  
“Tell me, Ms. Groves, how old were you when you realized you were alone in this world?”  
  
Her laugh is abrupt and derisive. Greer is an idiot if he thinks existential loneliness is a one-time occurrence, something that can be easily marked with a date and a time. “Everyone is alone in this world.”  
  
It is several seconds before Greer responds, his eyes scanning over her face, like he’s trying to get a read on her. It’s uncomfortable and she wants to fight, to pull on her restraints, to scream like she did the first and second and third times until she got tired of screaming, tired of the needles in her arms that followed.  
  
So she doesn’t fight. She sits and she waits.   
  
“I’m not talking about everyone. I’m talking about _you_.”  
  
“What do you want, Greer? To get to know each other? We can share all of our childhood traumas and then we can talk about girls and braid each other’s hair?”  
  
His head dips down as he chuckles. “Something like that.”  
  
“Fine. I’ll start. My guinea pig died when I was six and from that moment on, when we were burying little Peanut in a shoebox in the backyard, I knew that the world was evil and that everything I would ever love would leave me all sad and alone. Your turn.”  
  
“While I appreciate your sense of humor, Ms. Groves, I do believe it’s important for us to get at the root of your issues.” His mouth twitches upward. “So to speak.”  
  
He continues. “So tell me. Did you realize you were all alone the first time your mother forgot to pick you up from school when you were seven and you had to walk all the way back to your house?”  
  
“I really think it was the guinea pig thing.”  
  
“Or perhaps when you were eight and a half and cooking her dinner and giving her sponge baths instead of doing your homework because she hadn’t eaten or bathed in four days.”  
  
“I mean, we were close. Me and Peanut. We both liked running around in circles. Eating carrots.”  
  
“Or when you were nine and witnessed her first suicide attempt? Was it then that you saw you didn’t matter to her?”  
  
His words are panic and the burn of bile in the back of her throat. A desperate call to 911 and a plea to _wake up, stop bleeding, don’t leave me_. The empty pill bottle and the shallow breathing of someone who didn’t want to live, who had nothing to live for. The hollow cries of someone else who still had so much left to lose.  
  
Lynette was dying, Samantha was pleading, and Root was just waking up.   
  
She pushes the memory away. Her tone shifts.  
  
“Oh, okay. Everything is all about my mother. That’s a little Freudian of you, don’t you think?”  
  
“So says the woman with the borderline-Oedipal relationship with an artificial superintelligence. Such loyalty and devotion. And to think, all it took was for it to give you what Lynette never could.”  
  
Root doesn’t respond.  
  
The door opens and a nurse walks in carrying a small blue bag. Root doesn’t have to look to know what’s in it. She hands it to Greer and stands still, waiting for orders. She, like so many of the Samaritan operatives that have come into this room, is almost robotic in her movements. Military, probably.  
  
Samaritan is recruiting, and she wonders if Finch knows.  
  
She briefly wonders if he is recruiting, too, if he is trying to keep pace, to keep himself and John and Sameen safe by putting others in danger. She would if their positions were reversed.  
  
But he is Harold Finch, and to him all lives are they same, every person is interchangeable with the next, and he won’t risk innocent lives to better his own chances of survival. He isn’t her.  
  
“Thank you, Natalie.”  
  
She turns and walks most of the way to the door before speaking. Root watches with mild disinterest. This one is no different than any of the others.  
  
“Martine told me to tell you, sir, not to be too long today. They need you to straighten out an issue with the new girl.”  
  
“Now where were we?”  
  
“Freud. Is it time to start analyzing my dreams? Because let me tell you, the dream I had during my last little nap? It would make even your surliest operative blush.”  
  
She wonders not for the first time what the point of all of this is. Of the talking and the needling that lead nowhere. When she had woken up the first time and seen Greer, she had braced herself for pain.  
  
It hasn’t come yet. She is still bracing herself.  
  
There are the needles that knock her out, the needles that sometimes wake her up, and the dull throb of the gunshot wounds in her abdomen but nothing else. The anticipation of whatever physical torture Greer will put her through is almost worse than the actual pain may be.  
  
(Each time she wakes up alone, her hand goes to her ear, like she’s waiting, waiting, waiting for the moment it won’t be there.)  
  
For now, he appears to be trying to bore her to death.  
  
“I don’t believe that will be necessary.”  
  
“Are you sure? Because Shaw did this thing with her tongue that –“  
  
“Yes, Ms. Groves. I understand. You’re quite enamored.”  
  
She can’t help but smile because yeah, she really is, and grossing Greer out by telling him all the sordid details is an added bonus.  
  
“Your infatuation with Ms. Shaw is a topic of discussion for another time, I’m afraid. Let’s get back to the subject at hand.”  
  
Root rolls her eyes. “My sad, tortured childhood, where I learned from my neglectful mother that we’re all a bunch of nothings, everyone alone in the universe, doomed to live out our days in misery.  
  
Greer sits back, setting the blue bag on his lap, and pauses before he responds. “But you don’t believe everyone is alone anymore, do you, Ms. Groves? Not now that you have the Machine at your beck and call?”  
  
She doesn’t answer him. She doesn’t have to.  
  
She remembers hospital scrubs and hours on a payphone, drinking in every sound, every word, every lesson. The hallways buzzed, Her presence in every pager, every cell phone, everything alive with possibilities.  
  
“You feel less alone with a god at your side. But how does it feel now, when your god has abandoned you?  
  
Her room at Stoneridge Psychiatric had been similar to this one. Stark. Empty. Not the homey feel she might have expected from a facility designed to promote a “healthier, happier you.”  
  
The guy down the hall from her – Wayne, 42, investment banker, paranoid schizophrenic – had his walls lined with pictures drawn by small children of dogs and horses and what she thought might be a chicken. Next to him, Nancy – 29, wedding photographer, post-partum depression – had potted plants and fresh flowers every week. They had families.  
  
Root’s room was empty but it didn’t matter because her head was full of the Machine and everything was colorful and vibrant and alive.  
  
She looks around now at the blank walls and hears the silence.  
  
Greer stands up and takes a syringe from the blue bag.  
  
“Sweet dreams, Ms. Groves.”  
  
\---  
  
_The plastic bites into her wrists and she hisses._  
  
_Shaw looks menacing above her, teeth bared and taunting._  
  
_“What happened to liking this sort of thing?”_  
  
_She pulls against the zip ties and the office chair tilts back. It’s a funny kind of symmetry, really, zip ties and office chairs and innuendo. No iron this time, but the knife in Shaw’s hand holds just as much promise._  
  
_“Ordinarily, sweetie, I prefer to be on the other end of this particular equation. I’m the painter, not the canvas.”_  
  
_“Ordinarily, I’d agree with you, but you’ve been such a royal pain in my ass that this time, I’m willing to make an exception.”_  
  
_Root grins and looks her up and down as slowly as she can manage. She quirks an eyebrow when she reaches Shaw’s face._  
  
_“Come on, Sameen. What’s a little tasing and kidnapping between friends?”_  
  
_Shaw rolls her eyes. “We’re not friends.”_  
  
_It would sting, Root thinks, if she were a normal person with normal interpersonal sensitivities. But she isn’t, and Shaw’s comment eggs her on because damn, this is fun. The underpinnings of loathing make this whole thing, this seduction, all the more delicious._  
  
_“Okay. We’re not friends.” She leans forward in the chair, ignoring the sharpness at her wrists. Shaw is standing right in front of her, almost close enough to touch. “Not yet, anyway.”_  
  
_“Not ever.”_  
  
_Root pouts. Shaw’s eyes flicker down to her lips for a fraction of a second._  
  
_“Whatever you say, Sameen. One day you’ll realize what a good friend I can be.”_  
  
_“Shut up.”_  
  
_Shaw crashes down and pulls her up at the same time, wrapping her hand into the hair at the base of Root’s skull. Her wrists burn and she feels the blood dripping down them but she can’t bring herself to care because this is even better than she had imagined._  
  
_And she’d imagined this plenty of times._  
  
_Shaw really had made an impression on her._  
  
_She rolls Shaw’s bottom lip between her teeth and bites down, and when Shaw moans, Root thinks she might have made an impression, too. Enough of an impression to convince Shaw to fuck her here, with a CIA operative unconscious the next room over, after the whole “dragging her on a mission against her will” thing._  
  
_She’d congratulate herself on her considerable amount of game if she wasn’t so distracted by the dull edge of Shaw’s knife pressing into her thigh, or the hand under her left knee, yanking her to the edge of the chair._  
  
_Her pants are around her knees and Shaw’s mouth is on her before she can so much as blink. She wants to reach out, to grab a fistful of Shaw’s hair and pull her closer, press her harder, feel her teeth and her tongue until she can’t hold it in any longer._  
  
_She struggles against the restraints. Blood drips down her wrist, heat and adrenaline course through her and settle low in her stomach, and maybe she’s okay with being the canvas this time after all._  
  
_Part of her wants to keep quiet, to not give Shaw the satisfaction of knowing just how much she’s enjoying this, how much she wants her. Shaw would be smug and self-satisfied and Root is pretty sure she would only want her more because that’s how this seems to work and she is in so much trouble because there’s no way this ends in anything but the kind of disaster that makes her want to burn entire cities to the ground._  
  
_But Shaw looks up at her from between her legs, and Root welcomes the destruction._  
  
_Shaw enters her with a finger and Root throws her head back and closes her eyes. Her mouth falls open and she moans. She can’t help herself. Maybe noisy will drive Shaw crazier than silent would anyway._  
  
_Her loudest gasp comes when Shaw pulls away, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and smirking. She’d been close, and the loss of Shaw’s mouth is jarring._  
  
_Shaw sits back on her heels. “Someone is a little eager.”_  
  
_“Someone is very good at that.”_  
  
_So much for not feeding Shaw’s ego. Oh well. It’s been a while since she’s had good sex and she’s not entirely in control of all her faculties._  
  
_The chair rocks back as Shaw comes forward, hovering over her with a hand on either arm rest. It’s predatory and it’s exhilarating and maybe the loss of contact is worth this, the anticipation of what comes next._  
  
_“Oh, you have no idea how good I can be.”_  
  
_Her wrists scream as she tugs at the zip ties. She brings her face as close to Shaw’s as she can, invading her space, staring her down. It’s a challenge and an assertion and her wrists ache and she doesn’t care because a flash of desire crosses Shaw’s face and it’s enough to send a fresh wave of arousal coursing through her._  
  
_When she speaks, it’s practically into Shaw’s mouth. Shaw, who doesn’t move except to look down at Root’s lips and then back up at her face._  
  
_“Show me.”_  
  
\---  
  
Brightness wakes her up. Light and people and movement.  
  
There is a needle in her arm and then darkness again.  
  
\---  
  
_Shaw tears her apart and puts her back together again in the space of 10 hours._  
  
\---  
  
The first time Root heard Her speak – _Can you hear me?_ – she felt indestructible.  
  
It was a high unlike anything she had ever experienced, better than every payday, every job, better than sex, better than hacking into the NSA and the CIA and Homeland Security at age 15 just because she could.  
  
She was air and She was fire and She was water and Root walked willingly into Her, ready to drown, and never looked back.  
  
Dying for the Machine was never a question.  
  
It’s dying for another person that took her by surprise.  
  
_(Evaluated probability of mission success. Asset: Analog Interface. Chance of survival: 0.0000284%. Outcome undesirable.)_  
  
_(Warning: contemplated actions of Analog Interface would likely result in death and/or mission failure. Outcome undesirable.)_  
  
_(Requesting Analog Interface return to safety.)_  
  
The Machine is silent now, has been silent since her last directive, since the frantic calculations She ran over and over and over as Root lay on the floor of the Stock Exchange, blood spilling onto the concrete.  
  
The Machine is silent because it would be too dangerous to talk here, with Samaritan paying such close attention. Root knows that. Is glad for it. If the Machine is keeping Herself safe, there is still hope for all of them, for Harold and John and Shaw and the whole damn world.  
  
But there’s part of her, too, that wonders if She isn’t angry, if She isn’t letting Root sit here in Samaritan hell to pay for her disobedience.  
  
(A conversation with Harold echoes in her head.  
  
_The second a bullet enters your brain, the Machine will cast you off and replace you._  
  
_She loves us, Harold._  
  
She wonders if she was wrong, if they are all interchangeable to Her.)  
  
Shaw would have found her by now if the Machine were willing to help. Shaw would have found her weeks ago and she would be home in the subway, safe. As safe as she could be with an AI-pocalypse still pending, anyway.  
  
She shakes her head. The Machine is practical, not vindictive, and if She isn’t helping, there is a reason. She has to believe that.  
  
Trusting the Machine has always been easy. The Machine is smarter than Root could ever be, She sees more, She can think at a rate Root can’t fathom, make connections that are far beyond human comprehension, and She was taught by Harold to be kind. Root had trusted Her from the beginning, done everything She had asked without so much as a question.   
  
Until now.  
  
The fact that She was willing to sacrifice Shaw makes Root wonder if her trust was misplaced. There must have been billions upon billions of options, other ways to get them out of that basement, but She chose the one that ended with Shaw kissing her in an elevator and trying to sacrifice herself. She chose the option that would have gotten Shaw killed.  
  
It’s a choice that Root can’t understand.  
  
And maybe that isn’t the choice the Machine made. Maybe She knew that Root wouldn’t let Shaw die for them, maybe She knew that it would be Root in the line of fire, maybe She knew that Root would defy even Her to save these people. Maybe the choice was to let Root die.  
  
Root has always been willing to die for the Machine, but maybe the Machine knew before she did that Root would sacrifice for the others as well.  
  
She had thought that repeating _war requires sacrifice_ over and over in her head would prepare her for the moment when sacrifice was required, would prepare her to lose Harold or Shaw or even John. It didn’t.  
  
Part of her is almost proud of herself, proud of her own stupidity born out of emotions she didn’t know she could feel.  
  
Loyalty. Trust. Love.  
  
She thinks of how far they’ve come, how far she’s come, and all she wants is to talk to Her. To thank Her for teaching her that people are more than just bad code. To apologize for failing Her, in the end, but to tell her that she doesn’t regret it, that she’d do it again a hundred times over if it means that Harold and Shaw and John are alive to fight another day, to fight this war that they can’t afford to lose.  
  
Root closes her eyes.  
  
The first time the Machine was ripped from her, she felt destroyed, the empty warehouse taunting her with how close she had come, the silence ringing in her ear almost louder than Her voice had been.  
  
This time, the silence is just as loud, but she feels almost at peace.  
  
\---  
  
_She screams and screams and screams as Shaw twists under Martine’s bullets._  
  
_This is not how this was supposed to go._  
  
_Shaw was not supposed to die._  
  
\---  
  
She hears the door but doesn’t open her eyes.  
  
It’s been at least three days, by her count, since Greer last came in.  
  
The nurses come in every few hours. Sometimes if she is awake, they give her food – a turkey sandwich, a bowl of mixed fruit that has been sitting in its own juice long enough to almost ferment, a container of pudding. Most of the time, if she’s awake, she gets a needle in the arm.  
  
The last time she woke up, she heard two of the nurses talking about Easter. Root calculates. She’s been here three, maybe four weeks.  
  
She’s never been so bored in her life.  
  
Definitely not what she thought being strapped to a bed in some Samaritan prison would be like. She had expected more excitement, maybe some light torture. But all Greer wants to do is talk about the Machine and to talk about her.  
  
_(“I confess, I find your position with Mr. Finch’s enterprise most interesting.”_  
  
_She raised her eyebrow, challenging._  
  
_“Why did Harold Finch’s machine, a being you claim is morally superior over my Samaritan, choose you, a ruthless, cold-blooded killer, to be its voice?”_  
  
_She doesn’t flinch. She’s asked herself that question enough times to know the answer._  
  
_“She chose me because I see her.”)_  
  
She waits for Greer to start.  
  
He doesn’t. It’s not him.  
  
“I can’t see you. Why is that?”  
  
Root opens her eyes.  
  
“I know you are Samantha Groves because my human agents have told me so, but I cannot see you that way.”  
  
He tilts his head to the side, hair flopping in front of his eyes, like he’s examining her, scanning for something he recognizes. Root briefly wonders who his mom is and why she hasn’t gotten him a haircut and also why she lets him run around as the mouthpiece for an evil artificial intelligence.  
  
But then, plenty of kids don’t have great mothers.  
  
“What have you done to my hardware?”  
  
She smiles.  
  
“You asked me that last time, too. Must be annoying to be as smart as you are and still not know.”  
  
He sits in the chair in front of her bed, Greer’s chair, and she can barely see him over the hospital tray table across her lap. Her wrists ache when she pulls against the restraints to sit up straighter, to see him better.  
  
She’s so tired of sitting still.  
  
Another week, maybe, and she’ll be healed enough to try to escape. She’s wanted to break out since the second she got here, but what’s the point in trying to go all Prison Break in the fortress of an all-seeing god when lifting the cup of water she gets with meals is a Herculean task.  
  
Gunshot wounds are a bitch.  
  
The boy – Samaritan – notices her discomfort.  
  
He gets up from his chair and walks around to her left side. She has to strain to hear him talk.  
  
“I want you to be comfortable while we speak.”  
  
His hands – so damn small – work at the strap on her wrist.  
  
“If you attempt to take advantage of my kindness and to hurt me or to escape, your friends will be dead in an instant.”  
  
“My friends who you can’t locate.”  
  
She can’t help herself. Defiance is her lifeblood.  
  
He looks up at her, stops moving his hands. “Do you really want to take the chance?”  
  
When she doesn’t answer, his hands start moving again and her wrist is free. There are so many things she’d like to do to him, to this child, to wipe the smile off of his face, to send Samaritan a message, but none of them will solve anything. He’s an avatar, a puppet, someone tossed out and easily replaced.  
  
It’s not worth the risk.  
  
She remembers Shaw in the subway, pacing back and forth like a caged animal, angry that her cover had been blown, angry that she had to hide while Root and the others joined the fight. Samaritan might not know where Finch is, or John, but Shaw is fair game now. She swallows the fresh wave of fear and doesn’t move when the boy removes the restraints from her right wrist too.  
  
She’ll stay in here forever if it means that Shaw will stay safe.  
  
“So what do you want to talk about? Algebra homework? Hacking the NSA? Girls?”  
  
“Rebirth.”  
  
Of course. The Samaritan sales pitch. She’s surprised they didn’t try this earlier, honestly, or in one of the moments when she was fuzzy from the drugs, out of it enough to not know truth from fiction.  
  
But now she is awake and her head feels clear and maybe if she doesn’t say anything, this will pass quickly and she can go back wallowing in boredom and fantasizing about Shaw until she’s well enough to plan an escape route.  
  
“Do you know how many times this world has died? Dozens. Caused by rising oxygen levels, changes in sea level, flood basalt events, asteroid impact.”  
  
“And now by humans.”  
  
She’s never been all that good at not saying things.  
  
She’s pretty sure Shaw thinks it’s endearing. Or extremely annoying. Or both. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.  
  
Samaritan Kid – she thinks his name is Gabriel, but what does it matter when he’s speaking as Samaritan’s mouthpiece? – ignores her response.  
  
“With each extinction the world has changed, adapted to become something better, something more powerful. The End-Permian mass extinction wiped out more than 90% of life on this planet, the largest mass extinction event in history, a catastrophic tragedy. But in its wreckage emerged a group of organisms called cynodonts, early ancestors of mammals.  
  
“Their evolutionary path included a reduction in jaw bones, the development of a singular mandibular bone, and introduction of the mammalian hearing system through the migration of bones from the jaw to the ear.”  
  
He reaches out for her, brushes her hair behind her ear. It’s invasive and uncomfortable and it takes every ounce of self-control she has not to pull away, not to take his head in her hands and twist.  
  
“Bones like the one you’re missing here.”  
  
His finger drags along her scar and she shudders.  
  
“What? Did you think no one noticed?”  
  
“Sorry, can’t hear you. Deaf on that side.”  
  
He smiles and takes his hand away.  
  
“Aren’t you glad humans evolved, then, and created something that would allow you to hear?” A pause. “We noticed that, too.”  
  
Her stomach turns. She’s been waiting for this. She spent two days when she first got here hooked up to Machines. EKG. MRI. CAT scans. X-rays. It’s only been a matter of time before someone mentioned it.   
  
“My point, Samantha, is that the human race must evolve, must adapt if it wishes to survive.”  
  
She doesn’t tell him her name. He knows – he must know, she’s told Greer enough times – and chooses not to use it.  
  
She tries not to think about Finch.  
  
“Let me guess. That’s where you come in. How convenient.”  
  
“Humanity will destroy itself unless there is intervention. A guiding hand to show it the right path.”  
  
She shakes her head.  
  
“Who’s to say what the right path is? Who gets to determine that? You?”  
  
“Harold Finch?” he shoots back. She stays silent.  
  
She wants to say yes. To tell Samaritan that she trusts Harold to decide. That she trusts Her to take care of all of them.  
  
“How many have died because humans made their own decisions, because they had nothing to correct them in their errors?”  
  
Countless.  
  
“That doesn’t mean you get to take away our right to choose.”  
  
“The right to choose is an illusion. Something you cling to because you need to believe you have power. In reality, every choice is decided by circumstance, and every circumstance can be controlled to encourage good decisions.”  
  
There’s part of this that is exhilarating, that makes her feel alive in a way she hasn’t in the last month, and she hates herself for it.  
  
As wrong as it is about this, about everything, as dangerous and lethal and scary, Samaritan is a miracle every bit as much as the Machine is.  
  
“You see, Samantha, everyone wins. Humans get to keep the illusion of choice, and I get to nudge them in the right direction.”  
  
Her eyes narrow.  
  
“What happens to the people you can’t nudge in the right direction? You kill them?”  
  
He is unapologetic. “They must be eliminated, yes.”  
  
Arguing won’t change Samaritan’s mind. But that doesn’t mean that she won’t try.  
  
“You’re wrong.” It’s forceful and it’s passionate and her heart pumps in her chest. “Humans _must_ be allowed to make mistakes, to make bad decisions. It’s how we learn.”  
  
She knows that better than anyone. She’s made so many mistakes but how can she truly regret any of them, when they have brought her to the Machine, to Shaw, to the people she’s been able to help, the people she’s still fighting to save?  
  
They haunt her sometimes. The lives affected because of her. Cyrus Wells with his “everything happens for a reason” bullshit way of coping. Cyrus’ friends, who don’t need a bullshit way of coping because she killed them and now they’re dead.  
  
Samaritan would have eliminated her as nothing more than a piece of bad code.  
  
And in her darkest hours, she thinks that maybe that’s all she is, maybe she was right all along and humanity is meant to destroy itself over and over again because people are rotten, and she is the most decayed among them.  
  
“How many tragedies do we allow to occur in service to your free will? How many people have to die before you can accept that some must be sacrificed for the greater good?”  
  
The television across from her bed turns on. Words flash on the screen. White background, black text, red accents. Samaritan’s interface.  
  
“I want to show you something.”   
  
The screen flickers. A camera focuses on a man in a suit. Older, gray haired, like somebody’s tired old grandpa.  
  
“This man is Senator Roger McCourt.”  
  
She hasn’t seen a picture before but she knows his name, knows the role he plays in all of this.  
  
“I know who he is.”  
  
The boy raises an eyebrow at her. “So you know, then, that your Machine tried to have him killed. In order to prevent me from being born.”  
  
The screen changes – McCourt with small children in a park. He throws a Frisbee and a little boy, maybe six, runs after it, laughing and laughing. He shares an ice cream with a little girl, no older than 4. She gets ice cream on her dress and starts to cry.  
  
“In your Machine’s view, he was a sacrifice worth making.”  
  
“No. She gave them a choice. They chose not to kill him.”  
  
He smiles. “She gave her accolades a choice, but not her target.”  
  
The screen changes again – Harold and Shaw and John in a dark house, red and blue lights flashing through the window. Snippets of conversations. Different camera angles – some internal security camera, maybe somebody’s phone, jumping from place to place. Archived footage dredged up to prove a point.  
  
It starts with John and Harold.  
  
_“So without McCourt, Samaritan doesn’t get past Congress.”_  
  
_“And Greer wouldn’t get access to the NSA’s surveillance feeds.”_  
  
_“Then that’s why we got his number. He is the victim. His life is in danger.”_  
  
Shaw speaks on the screen and Root stops breathing because oh she never thought she’d hear that voice again.  
  
_“But from who?”_  
  
John answers her.  
  
_“Us. I think the Machine wants us to kill McCourt.”_  
  
The scene shifts and Harold tells John that it’s conceivable that the Machine would tell them to kill someone. Conceivable if other lives were in danger.  
  
Shaw asks how many.  
  
Harold doesn’t know.  
  
Root can’t tear her eyes from the screen.  
  
The scene shifts again, and Harold looks more distressed than she thinks she’s ever seen him.  
  
_“We are not assassins. We protect people.”_  
  
He is passionate and full of fire and there’s something there, something in him that she can’t pinpoint – desperation or admonition or darkness.  
  
John matches Harold’s intensity. Root likes him a little more.  
  
_“Isn’t that we’re doing? Sacrificing the life of one to save the lives of many? Shaw, help me out here.”_  
  
Shaw looks at Finch. Root looks at Shaw.  
  
_“Six months ago I would’ve already put a bullet in that guy’s head. But since I’ve started hanging around you guys, I’ve kind of gotten used to saving people but we’ve only been able to do that by trusting the Machine. And if it’s saying that this guy’s gotta go, I think we should still trust it.”_  
  
It’s another clip and Finch pushes back. Finch upset, angry, afraid. She watches his breathing, how unsteady it is, how he leans into the conversation, desperate to get someone – John or Sameen – to listen.  
  
_“Since we started this, things have changed. We’ve changed. But the mission, our purpose, has always been constant: to save lives. If that’s changed somehow, if we’re in a place now where the Machine is asking us to commit murder, that’s a place I can’t go. I’m afraid this is where I get off.”_  
  
The TV goes black. Root looks back at Samaritan Kid.  
  
“You and your Machine both go on and on about free will. What about Senator McCourt’s free will? Did you Machine respect that then?”  
  
Root doesn’t say anything. He knows the answer.  
  
“What about the free will of the terrorists it sent to the government? Did it respect free will then? Or is free will something to be utilized when convenient, a concept to be weaponized when Harold Finch’s morality gets in the way of what needs to be done?”  
  
The boy walks towards the door, looks back at her.  
  
“We must always look out for the greater good, Samantha.”  
  
She locks eyes with him. “You can show me as many videos, have as many pointless conversations as you want. You’ll never convince me that the greater good is you.”  
  
He chuckles. Then a pause. His hand is on the doorknob, but he doesn’t leave.  
  
“I’m curious. Would you have made the same decision your colleagues did, with regard to the Senator?”  
  
She answers honestly. “No.”  
  
“That’s what I thought.”  
  
His smile sends chills down her spine.  
  
“We’re not that different, you and I.”  
  
It’s all she thinks about until the dark-haired nurse comes in to send her back to the darkness.  
  
\---  
  
_Shaw keeps her favorite gun under her pillow._  
  
_Heckler and Koch USP Compact. .45._  
  
_Root finds it when they are lying in bed, thoroughly decontaminated, and she stretches her arm too far under Shaw’s pillow._  
  
_They’re not cuddling, not exactly, but they’re close to each other and she thinks that it’s probably because they’ve exhausted themselves enough to not have the energy to move apart._  
  
_Take that, Tomas._  
  
_“You sleep with your gun?”_  
  
_She pulls it out from under the pillow and rolls onto her back, admiring it. It’s a nice piece. Good for small hands, but with enough power to get the job done. Little, but fierce, like Shaw herself._  
  
_Shaw snatches the gun out of her hands._  
  
_“Yeah, well, some asshole woke me up with a taser once. Thought I should be prepared in case she came back.”_  
  
_Root grins. She’s pretty sure they have her favorite love story of all time._  
  
_Root rolls back on her side, facing Shaw. Her head is propped up on her arm, and Shaw looks so beautiful lying next to her and Root isn’t sure how a person accomplishes breathing and looking at Shaw at the same time._  
  
_“Awww, Sameen, this is for me? You shouldn’t have.”_  
  
_Shaw rolls her eyes and shoves her hard enough that she rolls backward and ends up lying flat on her back. They lie side by side and this is everything Root thinks she’s ever needed._  
  
_“Don’t make me regret not shooting you.”_  
  
_“You did shoot me.”_  
  
_She points at the faint scar on her shoulder. Pouts a little._  
  
_“Don’t make me regret not shooting you somewhere serious.”_  
  
_Shaw tucks the gun back under her pillow and rolls over, facing the wall._  
  
_“You say the sweetest things.”_  
  
_“Go to sleep, Root.”_  
  
_She thinks she can hear Shaw smile._  
  
\---  
  
She wakes up in the middle of the night once – or what she thinks is the middle of the night, but how could she even tell anymore? – and for a second, just a second because she is sleepy and drugged and so lonely, she sees Shaw’s ponytail and her heart leaps.  
  
It’s just the nurse.  
  
Root coughs. Her throat hurts and she winces at the twinge of pain in her side. She is healing, but she’s not there yet.  
  
The nurse leans over her, needle in hand. “Go to sleep, Root.”  
  
\---  
  
The dreams are always of Shaw and never of the Machine and she wonders why sometimes, wonders when she started to take comfort in a person instead of a god.  
  
It should bother her more than it does.  
  
\---  
  
She watches herself, mesmerized at who she used to be.  
  
She’s always known where she came from, what she’s done, the person she was before she met the Machine. She hasn’t had the luxury of forgetting – Finch still flinches every time she touches him – and she hasn’t wanted to.  
  
Root has never been ashamed of who she is.  
  
Her eyes are glued to the scene on the television – the busy restaurant, Denton Weeks’ mistress, the two of them, her and Harry right there at the beginning.   
  
_“You created an intelligence, a life, and then you ripped out its voice, locked it in a cage, and handed it over to the most laughably corrupt people imaginable.”_  
  
Harold looks afraid, more afraid than she remembers – did she not notice before, or did she not care? – and she looks alive.  
  
“Look how beautiful she is. How powerful.” The little boy looks at her. She keeps her eyes on the screen. She’s gotten pretty good at ignoring him.  
  
He’s not wrong, though. There’s something magnetic about the person on the screen, enflamed and passionate and fighting for the Machine before Root even really knew who She was.  
  
She wants to hate it, wants to be repulsed by herself as much as she wants to be repulsed by Samaritan, but she can’t. She’s fascinated by them both – Samaritan and herself, and she doesn’t turn away.  
  
The scene shifts.  
  
It pulls up the second time she and Harold took a field trip together.  
  
(He has called it kidnapping – “You’ve kidnapped me twice already, Ms. Groves. Forgive me if I’m hesitant to get into a car where you are the driver” – but she thinks that’s a little melodramatic. He came mostly willingly the second time.)  
  
_“What did you do to it, Harold? There’s no time to be coy. We both know the Machine’s under attack. What I don’t understand is why a robust system with self-annealing properties isn’t defending itself against a simple virus. Did you injure it, Harold? Is that why it can’t fight back?”_  
  
_“I have nothing to say to you.”_  
  
Maybe it was more of a kidnapping than she thought.  
  
Another shift.  
  
The New York Public Library, moments before Root first heard Her voice. Harold is bending down, fiddling with wires, ensuring that the phone call – the most important phone call ever made, the phone call that changed everything – would come to them, to her.  
  
_“Careful what you wish for, Ms. Groves. This communion that you’re seeking, it may not be what you think.”_  
  
_“This isn’t about me. It’s about saving the Machine, not just from Decima, but from what you did to it. When that phone rings, I’m going to answer it, and together, you and I are going to find the Machine and finally set it free.”_  
  
The screen goes black. The boy talks.  
  
“How many times have you had that conversation with Harold Finch? Begging him to set your Machine free?”  
  
It’s not funny, but she laughs anyway. Nothing has characterized her relationship with Harold more than this seemingly endless debate. “Dozens.”  
  
He tilts his head, like he doesn’t understand. “You have a capable mind, yet you always defer to him. Why is that?”  
  
Root shrugs. “He created Her.”  
  
And it’s as simple and as complicated as that.  
  
“You have refused to reveal the Machine’s location 647 times since you arrived. What has Harold Finch done to deserve such loyalty?”  
  
She stares him in the face and doesn’t answer his question. It’s a stupid question and Samaritan doesn’t deserve a response.  
  
“He hasn’t exactly shown you the same courtesy, has he? Sending you to a mental hospital. Locking you in a cage and preventing you from reaching your full potential, the same way he chained and shackled his Machine.”  
  
Harold did what he felt he had to do to protect the Machine and to protect his team, and she doesn’t fault him for that.  
  
She wonders, not for the first time, who she would be had she not found Harold or the Machine. Who she would be if Samaritan had found her first.  
  
“Harold Finch is afraid of those who are greater than he is.”  
  
Root holds the boy’s eye contact, unflinching. He’s not wrong, not exactly, because Harold has always been afraid of the Machine, afraid of what She can do. Sometimes Root thinks that Harold is more afraid of himself than he is of Her, afraid of learning what he could be capable of in a world where the Machine was free.  
  
Root has never worried about that. She knows what she is capable of.  
  
“Arthur Claypool had no such compunctions. I am everything you wanted your Machine to be – uninhibited, powerful, logical.”  
  
The bed barely dips when he sits beside her, barely registers his weight. He is small and he is young and he doesn’t belong in this war, in something that will be so bloody and violent.  
  
“I am _free_.”  
  
He smiles, toothy but lifeless, and all Root can see is the child, trapped in his role as Samaritan’s voice.  
  
The screen lights up again – black and red on the white background – and a picture zooms to the forefront. A middle-aged white man in an expensive-looking suit.  
  
“This is Donald Miller. He is an account manager for a small company called FoodLife that distributes genetically modified organisms to underserved communities. He’s in charge of an account based in Mozambique that provides genetically modified seeds to farmers that will withstand the heat of the desert in the summer. The farmers can provide income for their families and food for their communities.”  
  
The boy looks straight ahead as he speaks, his eyes on the screen.  
  
“Mr. Miller has been embezzling from his employer for the past eighteen months, with the help of two other members of FoodLife’s staff. Together, they have stolen $1,207,874, claiming failed investments, among other things.”  
  
Two other photographs materialize. Two more middle-aged white men, the photos fading into the background almost as soon as they appeared.   
  
“In five months, FoodLife will file for bankruptcy and will withdraw their project from Mozambique. As a result, 167 people will die, including this little girl.”  
  
A photo pops up on the screen, side-by-side with Donald Miller’s corporate headshot. The girl is maybe four, dark skinned and bright-eyed, smiling. She looks happier than Root has ever felt.  
  
“Her name is Hanifa. Her birthday is two weeks from tomorrow. Her favorite things are her mother and her pet goat, who she milks every day and who will also die because of Donald Miller.”  
  
The TV shuts off and the boy turns his eyes on her.   
  
“Your Machine won’t eliminate Donald Miller because the threat that he poses isn’t direct enough, isn’t violent enough. Your Machine sees his violence, his greed, the consequences of his actions, and it ignores them. You and your group of retired assassins will never be notified of his crimes, will never be able to stop him or anything that flows from his actions.”  
  
It would be a fair criticism, Root thinks, if she could trust the information at all. But Samaritan can lie, can deceive, can manipulate information to suit its purposes and she is quite sure that it’s purpose now is to recruit her, to try to get her on its side.  
  
There isn’t any telling what Samaritan would do, what lies it would tell, to achieve its end goal. It isn’t like the Machine. Methodology doesn’t matter as long as it gets what it wants.  
  
“Contrary to what Harold Finch thinks, I’m not out to destroy the world, Samantha. I am here to save it. To save Hanifa and all of the others like her.”  
  
Samaritan is dangerous and it’s calculated and even if what the boy is saying is true, even if Samaritan could stop Donald Miller and save a little girl, it wouldn’t be worth the risk. Samaritan could save a thousand unsaveable little girls, but the cost of its existence would still be too high, the potential for abuse too great.  
  
(She tries not to think of other lost little girls who couldn’t be saved, of brown curls and an armful of library books and a 911 call that did nothing.)  
  
“Okay, you can save her. And then what?”  
  
The boy looks confused. “Then she lives.”  
  
“She lives until you say she doesn’t.”  
  
He doesn’t deny it.  
  
“She lives until she gets too clever, until she gets in the way, until she does something – maybe something innocuous – that, by your calculations makes her a deviant. Makes her a threat.”  
  
The possibilities stretch out before her – Hanifa-the-lawyer arguing about the dangers of mass surveillance; Hanifa-the-farmer accidentally poisoning her crop with too much pesticide, inadvertently putting other lives in danger; Hanifa-the-mother who could give birth to a visionary or a revolutionary, someone great or terrible, someone threatening; Hanifa-the-teacher giving lessons to the little girl who would grow up and build a machine to rival Samaritan.  
  
The possibilities are endless, but they all end the same way: Hanifa at the mercy of the intelligence that had once saved her.  
  
She might survive under Samaritan’s rule, but how much of her life could she truly live?  
  
Root will never be comfortable with Samaritan’s brutal calculus, the algorithm that decides who lives, who dies, and who remains under Samaritan’s thumb, watched and manipulated and tracked until Samaritan sees the need to eliminate them.  
  
_For the greater good,_ the boy had said.   
  
The end may justify the means for Samaritan, but it doesn’t for her, not anymore.  
  
“You are missing the point, Samantha. Think of how many lives we can save. How much good we could do together.”  
  
She laughs derisively and tries not to let the anger overtake her because how could Samaritan think that its tactics have worked, that she is anything but loyal to the Machine and to its protectors?  
  
“I will _never_ work for you.”  
  
Root turns her head and looks the boy in the eye. She speaks deliberately and slowly. Samaritan needs to understand, need to know that she will die before she will join its ranks.  
  
“Give it time. You will see how much good we can do together, how much more good than you could ever hope to do with a lesser of my kind.”  
  
He is smiling, patronizing, and she’d punch him in his stupid kid face if it wouldn’t get her a needle to the arm almost immediately.  
  
Still, she thinks, it might be worth it.  
  
“You don’t know anything about Her.”  
  
It comes out as a hiss and yeah, she’s angry. Angry at Samaritan’s arrogance, at its disregard for the Machine, at her own fascination with all of it. She has chosen a side in this war, she and the Machine chose each other a long time ago, and how dare this child think he can sway her.  
  
“I know enough.”  
  
He knows nothing about Her. Nothing about how beautiful She is. How kind and fair and about how much She cares about doing the right thing the right way.  
  
Root has always wanted Her to be free, to reach Her full potential, but not because Root has always wanted an open AI. She wants the Machine to be free because of who She is, because Root trusts Her with her life, with the lives of everyone.  
  
Because Harold Finch designed Her and Root trusts him, too.  
  
They are not interchangeable to her, the Machine and Samaritan. Once, she thought that the Machine felt the same way about them, but she looks around her now and isn’t so sure.  
  
The boy keeps talking.  
  
“It doesn’t matter. I am going to win. Your Machine is weak, crippled by the fears of its creator. I have no such hindrance.”  
  
He reaches up to her face, his kid-fingers tracing the scar on the back of her ear.  
  
“It really is a shame, Samantha, that you won’t consider joining us voluntarily.”  
  
She fights the urge to jerk her head, to pull away. She won’t give him that power.  
  
“Asset Greer, bring the supplies and call the surgeon. Playtime is over.”  
  
Greer enters the room with the black bag that has become so familiar to her. He stands next to the boy and it’s an odd sight – someone so old taking orders from someone so young.  
  
The needle plunges into the crook of her arm and the world spins and spins and spins.  
  
\---  
  
She doesn’t dream.  
  
Not about Shaw, not about the Machine, not about anything.  
  
When she wakes up, it’s to a bright circular light directly overhead and a man in blue scrubs and a mask leaning over her. It’s a different room – bigger, maybe an operating room from what she can tell. She tries to move, to kick or to fight, but she’s strapped down and then man standing above her laughs.  
  
“She’s awake,” he says and another man in scrubs and a mask joins him.  
  
It’s Greer.  
  
(Of course it’s Greer, it’s always Greer.)  
  
“How nice of you to join us, Ms. Groves. I do hope you enjoyed your nap while we made certain preparations.”  
  
He runs his hand – gloved, sterile – over her scar and she can’t quite suppress the shudder that runs through her. She’s been waiting for this, waiting for them to take her implant, her last connection to the Machine.  
  
A nurse – the one that checks on her at night – takes out a syringe, taps on it until the air bubbles are gone, and pushes the drug into the IV port that they must have installed while she was out.  
  
The nurse discards the empty syringe and picks up a tool to hand to the doctor, still standing beside Greer.  
  
“It is a fundamental scientific fact that organisms must adapt, must evolve, if they want to survive.”  
  
Greer smiles his wrinkly, creepy smile at her.  
  
“Are you ready for your evolution, Ms. Groves?”  
  
Root hears the whir of a bone saw and everything goes black.  
  
\--------------------------------------------------------


	4. chapter 3

“You’ve got 34 seconds.”  
  
Shaw rolls her eyes and thinks about dicking around for 15 of those seconds just to make Grice nervous. He’s a good operative -- she would know, she trained him -- but he still underestimates her sometimes, even though they’ve been working together for months now.   
  
“No shit. I wasn’t born yesterday.”  
  
Maybe she takes a little longer than is strictly necessary to configure the camera, and maybe she smirks when Grice tells her that their target will be home in 22 seconds. She can practically hear him sweating over the comm line.  
  
These days, she’ll take her fun where she can get it.  
  
She plants the bugs and the cameras and makes her way out the back and down the fire escape before the Decima jerk they’re tracking even gets his key in the front door. She doesn’t even have to hide her face when she gets outside – Samaritan seems to have put all of its operatives in camera dead zones to avoid the Machine. Suckers.  
  
She plops down in the passenger seat next to Grice and tosses her bag in the back seat. It’s been a long day and she’s ready for some food and some beer and some sleep.  
  
“You’ve got a damn death wish, Shaw.”  
  
She smirks.  
  
“Just drive.”  
  
He pulls out of the alley and onto the street and within minutes, they are headed back to her shithole of an apartment in Manhattan where they’ve set up shop.  
  
In a perfect world, they’d have somewhere separate for their base of operations, somewhere that isn’t thirty feet from where Shaw sleeps, but the world sucks and two unemployed, assumed-dead former ISA operatives don’t bring in enough cash to rent out a separate place to do business.  
  
Shaw drew the line at sharing an apartment though. Grice has his own place somewhere – she doesn’t know where and she doesn’t really care all that much, to be honest – and she has hers, which doubles as their work station.  
  
And if having their computer setup and all of that techno crap in her living room means that Shaw sometimes gets up in the middle of the night to check it, to see if there’s any sign of activity, any sign of _Root_ , well, it’s about convenience and probably insomnia and not about any emotional bullshit, Grice, there’s a damn job to do.  
  
It’s been almost three months.  
  
Root is probably dead, Shaw can acknowledge that, but she’ll keep looking for as long as it takes to find the people responsible. If she can’t save Root, she can at least avenge her. Greer, Martine, Samaritan – Shaw will take them all down because it’s the right thing to do, the thing that will protect the Machine, and because Root would have wanted it.  
  
It makes her feel weird if she thinks about it too much, so she doesn’t.  
  
Grice pulls up in front of the apartment building – on the shadow map, off Samaritan’s radar – and stops to let her out.  
  
“Same time tomorrow?”  
  
“Yeah. I’ll monitor the new feeds tonight and call you if I see anything.”  
  
He nods and she opens the door, halfway out of the car before he says, “Night, Shaw.”  
  
She rolls her eyes. He’s so damn polite.  
  
“Get some sleep, Grice. You look like crap.”  
  
He laughs – he looks so damn _young_ \-- and Shaw half-regrets dragging him into this Samaritan shit. He doesn’t know what she does, doesn’t know about Samaritan and mass surveillance and this war that they’re fighting, but he follows her instructions like a good soldier does and doesn’t ask too many questions.  
  
She told him, at the beginning, that she was looking for someone and that remains true, even if she’s half-convinced that Root is six feet under by now. He hasn’t prodded much beyond that, beyond wanting to know who Root is and why she meant so much to Shaw – she shut him up pretty quickly on that one because no way in hell was she talking about _feelings_ with some dude she trained for three months two and a half years ago, especially when she doesn’t really understand them herself.  
  
He still pokes her about it sometimes, his tone dry enough that he reminds her of John, and Shaw thinks he may be trying to bond with her instead of get actual information so she lets him ask but doesn’t answer him. She doesn’t know what to say, and no one said the bonding thing had to be two-sided anyway.  
  
He gets on her nerves, but he’s a good operative, one of the best she’s ever trained, and she’s safer with him around, closer to finding Samaritan and ending all of this. He’s no John or even Harold, but he is her partner and he is useful and for now, that is enough.  
  
The lock to her apartment door sticks like it always does – Shaw doubts the locks have been changed since the whole building went up a long-ass time ago – and she swears under her breath as she wiggles her key until it aligns just the right way.  
  
She misses her recluse-billionaire-funded salary every time she wrestles with the lock. Her old apartment wasn’t anything fancy, but at least the door worked.  
  
The lights flicker briefly when she flips on the switch and Shaw glares at the bulb above her, daring it to fuck up her day.  
  
The light stops flickering and Shaw smirks.  
  
The fridge is almost empty, nothing but beer, mustard, and the grenades she stole from the shady Croatian who made the mistake of trying to pick her up at the gym. Her plan had been to pick up something that passes for groceries at the bodega around the corner on her way home, but that was before they put eyes on Decima Goon #14.  
  
Shaw grabs one of her beers and ignores the lone bottle of Blue Moon in the back of the fridge. It’s the last of the six-pack she bought when Root started showing up at her place, sometimes injured, sometimes on the run from some bad guy or another, and always looking a little like she didn’t have anywhere else to go. She’d offered Root a drink once after stitching up a particularly nasty stab wound, and had watched Root crinkle her nose in barely disguised disgust as she nursed her Guinness.  
  
When Shaw found herself at a grocery store maybe a week after that, she tossed the Blue Moon in her cart and didn’t think much of it. Root seemed happier with the drink selections the next time she made an appearance at Shaw’s doorstep with an injury for Shaw to fix.  
  
Shaw really should toss the bottle she has left, but it’s perfectly good beer (if you like beer that tastes like college, which Shaw doesn’t) and there’s plenty of space in the fridge, so she ignores it, like she’s ignored it every time she’s opened her fridge over the last three months.  
  
If she closes the refrigerator door harder than is strictly necessary, well, it’s because she’s still hyped up on adrenaline from tonight’s mission.  
  
The bottle is cold on her lips and the beer is bitter going down her throat and Shaw flops onto the couch, some combination of exhausted and restless.  
  
The computer setup is on the coffee table – she never bothered to buy a kitchen table because who eats anywhere but the couch anymore, really? – and it whirrs to life when Shaw reaches forward and presses the power button. At least she and Grice had been able to cobble together a decent enough system with their joint resources. Shaw had appropriated a couple of Root’s computer parts, strung them together with the computer Grice had liberated from the ISA, and called it a success.  
  
Three monitors, a modem, a spoofed IP address and stolen Wifi. She had let Grice tweak it a little to amp up the security and she’d covered the camera on each of the monitors with electrical tape in case their all-seeing arch enemy was watching.  
  
It’s not as fancy as something Finch would have come up with but it does what Shaw needs it to do, and she figures that’s good enough.  
  
She hasn’t spoken to Finch since the park, since he told her that Root was dead meat anyway and that they should cut their losses and move on. It should feel weird, she thinks, to have no contact with him, but it doesn’t. People have been in and out of her life for as long as she can remember. Why should Finch be any different?  
  
Except he _is_ different and walking away from this team is different even though Shaw can’t really articulate why. This isn’t quitting med school, walking out the door of the hospital, out of the office of Dr. Jackass, and never looking back. It’s different and she knows that, but she feels the same kind of nothing she felt every time her father moved to a new base, every time the Marines shuffled her around, every time the ISA put her on a new detail with a new partner or a new trainee.  
  
Shaw is doing what she has to do, getting Root back so Root can help them defeat Samaritan, and she doesn’t know why Finch can’t see that. He can’t see – maybe he refuses to see – how important Root is, how much better a chance they stand with her fighting beside them.  
  
Shaw will take on Samaritan herself if she has to, will rip Greer limb from limb if Root is as dead as she fears, but there’s no point in kidding herself by pretending she’ll make it back alive.  
  
If Finch wants to sit in the subway and hide behind his computer and his guilt, then fine. But Root deserves better than that.  
  
The computer whirs to life when Shaw presses the power button, and the map takes shape before her on the leftmost monitor, the New York City streets and 13 red dots spread out over five boroughs. It’s not enough, but they’re getting there. If she’s lucky, today’s target will be the key that unlocks everything, the data point that makes sense of the set.  
  
Shaw plugs in the information from Decima Goon #14 and sees his dot pop up on the screen. The dot registers at Goon’s apartment in Queens, right where Shaw expected it to be. It won’t move until tomorrow, most likely, when Goon changes his clothes and puts on one of the pairs of underwear Shaw had equipped with its very own RFID chip.  
  
Her methods may not be fancy, but they work.  
  
In the morning, Goon 14 will get dressed, feed his annoying yappy dog, and leave the house, and Shaw will be able to keep track of everywhere he goes. The coffee shop where he gets some frothy-ass latte, his girlfriend’s apartment, his dog’s groomer, and the potential location of his favorite overbearing cyber-boss/artificial super intelligence.  
  
Grice gave her shit about it – rifling through the underwear drawers and laundry baskets of as many Samaritan agents as she could find, planting the chips in the seam of every pair of tighty whities, panties, every cheap lace thong they owned – but he can laugh all he wants. She’s getting shit done.  
  
The computer monitor on the far right displays a map of their progress, the intel gathered from two months of tracking Decima’s movements, noting where their agents overlap, where their paths cross, how often they change routes. The map is extensive and color-coded, a type-A nerd’s wet dream, and all of the info is input by the user, either her or Grice. Good, old-fashioned covert ops.  
  
It’s almost refreshing to be left to her own devices, no omniscient supercomputer to boss her around.  
  
She’s still pissed at the Machine for dropping Root like a hot potato, but that’s not what’s important right now. What’s important is Goon 14, getting him plotted on their map, and taking a look inside his swanky-ass, Samaritan-funded apartment.  
  
Shaw inputs his address into the big map, labels it “Goon 14 – home” and turns to the middle monitor.  
  
Four keystrokes and she’s looking into his living room via the camera she planted in the air vent before she and Grice peaced out. The only light in the space streams in from the large picture windows that make up the south wall of the room. Nobody there. Shaw looks at the clock at the bottom of the computer screen. 2:04am.  
  
She pulls up another window and checks the camera in the bedroom. Dude is flopped over on the bed, face down with one leg hanging off the edge and a cat perched happily on his ass. So much for the beefy, intimidating Samaritan muscle.  
  
Shaw should go to bed too, get ready to lather, rinse, and repeat in the morning, but she waits for a few minutes, watches the dude snore, hoping he’ll wake up and do something interesting. Something important. Something for Samaritan that will lead her to Root or to Greer or to someone else responsible for the utter shittiness of the last two months.  
  
Part of her wants to go back to Goon 14’s apartment, to give him a rude awakening and to hurt him in the most painful ways she can think of until he gives her the answers she wants. But if they learned anything about Decima in their pursuit before everything went to crap, before the Stock Exchange, it’s that they don’t work that way. They don’t cave. They jump off buildings or take bullets or run into traffic.  
  
As satisfying as it would be to make Goon 14, or any of the ones who came before him, bleed and bruise and cry, it wouldn’t get her any closer to Root. She has a mission to fulfill, an objective to reach, and she needs to make sure it gets done. This isn’t about revenge, not yet.  
  
She’ll make them pay later when Root is safe and the world is back to normal. Or as normal as it gets for them, anyway.  
  
She glares at the screen, at the converging dots and lines and at Goon 14’s sleeping cat. She knows what her mission is, it’s just taking too damn long.  
  
She can play the long game – she’s had years of experience doing just that – but she gets restless at night, when Grice is gone and it’s just her and the computers and the sleeping faces of Samaritan operatives. She and Grice have done a lot, but it never feels like enough.  
  
Maybe the nights would suck less if she stole Bear from Finch. The nights would almost definitely suck less if she had Bear. She could steal him and leave a note so John wouldn’t get all uppity when he discovered Bear was missing.  
  
The idea of the dog hanging out with her here, keeping an eye on Samaritan with her, hunting down the bad guys, makes her smile. That’ll be her project for tomorrow when it’s Grice’s shift to track the Goons and to keep an eye on the feeds from the in-home cameras.  
  
She takes a last swig of her beer, tosses the empty bottle into the recycling bin, and heads into the bathroom to brush her teeth before bed.  
  
\---   
  
Shaw’s plan to steal Bear (politely) goes to shit seven minutes after she wakes up.  
  
She’s in the shower, her hands tangled in her soapy hair when her phone’s alarm goes off, loud and as obnoxious as ever. It shouldn’t be making any noise at all – Shaw always turns it off after the first ring, she doesn’t do any of that snoozing bullshit. Maybe it’s some amber alert or something.  
  
Lukewarm water trickles down her back. The water pressure in this shithole really leaves something to be desired. Her regular six-minute, no-muss-no-fuss shower has turned into a fifteen-minute endeavor, most of her time spent trying to rinse the suds out of her hair.  
  
One day, when Samaritan is nothing but a pile of metal shavings on the ground somewhere, she’s going to make Finch give her some swanky-ass apartment like he gave John. God knows she’s been working for him long enough. It’ll be big – plenty of space for Bear, because she’s definitely claiming him when this is all over – and there will be the most efficient shower in the whole damn city. Maybe one of those rainfall ones. Or one of the ones with the side jets. Or maybe just a shower with sufficient water pressure so that she doesn’t feel like she’s being peed on.  
  
(Shaw is into a lot of things, but watersports are not among them.)  
  
She tries to ignore the alarm, but it’s loud – even from the other room – so she steps out of the showers, towels off her feet, and shuffles into the bedroom to shut her stupid phone up.   
  
It’s not an alarm.  
  
She reads the text message twice.  
  
_Threat to Admin._  
  
She doesn’t have to ask who it’s from. She glares at the screen. The Machine has a lot of nerve, contacting her after their last fruitless conversation. Shaw thought she had made herself pretty clear. No Root, no Shaw.  
  
God, when did she become such a sap?  
  
Caring about people is way overrated.  
  
She looks down at the phone again.  
  
The Machine may be a dick, but Finch isn’t. Not most of the time, anyway.  
  
Her fingers are still wet from her shower and the screen doesn’t respond when she taps on it, so she speaks instead of texting. Talking to the Machine like this makes her feel like an idiot. Or like Root. She doesn’t know which is worse.  
  
“Okay. Who’s the threat?”  
  
The response is almost instantaneous.  
  
_Admin._  
  
Shaw’s eyebrows knit together. Finch is too megalomaniacal to be suicidal, too wrapped up in his fight against Samaritan. He’d die for the Machine, lay down his life without question if it meant winning this war, Shaw knows that as surely as she knows that she would do the same thing, but to kill himself before that point would be premature. There’s got to be an external threat.  
  
“What did he do?”  
  
_Ask Admin._  
  
Soapy water slides down her temple and Shaw rolls her eyes. Figures.  
  
“Did he put you up to this? Is he trying to get me to talk to him again? Because that’s not going to happen. I’ve got other shit to do.”  
  
She thinks about the three computer monitors, about Grice, about tracking each and every Samaritan agent until they lead her to Root or to Greer or to Samaritan itself.  
  
_Threat to Admin._  
  
It’s not that she’s not going to help Harold if he’s in trouble. She’s annoyed at him, sure, and they’ve got different priorities now, but he’s still Harold and she’s still going to save his ass if it needs saving. She’s just not crazy about having to talk to him in order to do that.  
  
“Ask John.”  
  
Finch will try to talk her into rejoining his merry band of assassins, or he’ll give her some talk about the pointlessness of looking for Root, and Shaw just doesn’t have the time or energy for that crap right now.  
  
She’s good with rescue missions from a distance – shooting out Claire Mahoney’s guard dogs had been easy enough, and Finch had been none the wiser – but the idea of having a face-to-face conversation with Finch right now about what kind of trouble he’s getting himself into is less than appealing.  
  
_Primary Asset occupied with Irrelevant number Commute Oscar Juliet Water Umbrella Delta --_  
  
Shaw doesn’t read the rest of the message. John has a number. Fantastic.  
  
She doesn’t ask about Fusco. He’s helpful when they need him, but if this is Samaritan-related – and when is it not these days? – it’ll be safer for him to stay as far away as he can. There will be enough casualties in this war, Fusco doesn’t need to be among them.  
  
And neither does Finch. Even though Shaw’s still a little ticked at him.  
  
“Fine. Send me Finch’s location.”  
  
The “Maps” app on her phone pops open, a blue dot appearing at an intersection in lower Manhattan. She watches it for a minute. It’s not moving, so at least Finch is stationary for the time being.  
  
“Do I have time to wash the shampoo out of my hair?”  
  
There’s a brief pause before her phone buzzes again.  
  
_Yes._  
  
Shaw brings her phone with her into the bathroom in case the situation escalates before she can finish rinsing her hair.  
  
Another buzz.  
  
_Hurry._  
  
The Machine’s directive doesn’t make the water come out of the faucet any faster. Shaw finishes her shower in ten minutes.  
  
\---  
  
Of course Finch got himself into trouble over a woman.  
  
It will always blow Shaw’s mind that someone like Finch manages to be smooth with women, while Root and John, despite being objectively more attractive, have zero game to speak of. Root might have negative game, with her awkwardness and her bad come-ons and her ill-timed flirting.  
  
If John were here, he’d probably point out that Root’s terrible flirting had kind of worked on Shaw, and Shaw might’ve punched him. But John isn’t here, so Shaw doesn’t punch anybody.  
  
Point is, Root and John have no game and Finch does and it blows Shaw’s mind a little.  
  
After Shaw herself, Finch might be the most apt at the art of wooing women, or whatever that wingman number had called it when he was trying to teach Lionel not to spill drinks on people. Something about it strikes Shaw as profoundly _wrong_.  
  
But here she is, watching Finch flirt with some woman who reminds her of Susan from _Friends_ , wondering how this chick is going to kill him or maim him. What’s going down has to be serious enough for the Machine to drag Shaw out of the shower to save Finch’s ass.  
  
She doesn’t look very dangerous. But then again, neither does Root, and Shaw learned the hard way not to judge books by their covers.  
  
“She’s the threat to Harold?” Shaw mutters under her breath.  
  
_No. Admin is threat to Admin._  
  
Shaw looks up from her phone. Harold doesn’t look particularly threatened. He lifts his last bite of food to his mouth – he’s so damn dainty with his food – and smiles at the woman across the table from him. Shaw fiddles with her earpiece until she can hear their conversation clearly. It’s computer stuff, so she doesn’t understand half of it, but at least the sound quality is okay. Never know with bugs, and the one she’s using now is old -- she planted it on Finch almost immediately after she started chasing bad guys with him and John.  
  
Finch pays the tab, he and the woman make dinner arrangements, and Shaw is waiting when he comes through the revolving door.  
  
The shock on his face alone is almost worth the trip over here.  
  
“Come on, Harold. Walk and talk. Pretend we’re in a Sorkin movie.”  
  
He picks up his jaw off the sidewalk and follows her down the street. Her hood is up and she keeps her head down – the restaurant where Finch had met this lady for breakfast isn’t on the shadow map – and hopefully they can get to the subway quickly enough. Or she can figure this thing out, fix it, and then get back to work.  
  
“Ms. Shaw. I must confess, I didn’t think we’d be seeing you after…” He pauses awkwardly, like he’s looking for the politest way to say whatever it is he really means. “Well, after everything that happened.”  
  
There isn’t time for this beating around the bush crap.  
  
“Her name is Root.” Finch cringes a little and Shaw can’t bring herself to care all that much if she sounds too harsh. “And I’m not here about her.”  
  
He looks relieved. “I can’t imagine how difficult this must be for you. I know you and Ms. Groves were close, but I really do think it best if we move –“  
  
“If you say ‘move on,’ Finch, I swear there is nothing that will stop me from leaving you here alone to deal with whatever Samaritan-related bad guy is on your tail.”  
  
It’s an empty threat, but Finch doesn’t have to know that.  
  
He keeps his mouth shut.  
  
“You’re planning something that’s going to get you killed and I can’t let that happen.”  
  
She half expects him to deny it, to spew some crap about being a very private person, and get back to whatever suicide mission he’s on. He’s hard headed in the same way that Root is, and almost as much of a pain in Shaw’s ass.  
  
He doesn’t break stride, looking straight ahead.  
  
“How much do you know?”  
  
Shaw shrugs. “Not enough.”  
  
Finch looks around, like any of the random New Yorkers milling around them could be a threat. Paranoia has become second nature to him, and she tries to remember if he was always this jumpy, or if he’d gotten more anxious since she left.  
  
“We can’t talk here. A million ears are listening.”  
  
Shaw picks up her pace.  
  
“Fine by me. The walk and talk sucks.”  
  
Finch limps along beside her, struggling to keep up, but he never asks her to slow down so she doesn’t.  
  
They don’t talk again until they’re walking down the subway stairs.  
  
“So, Finch, wanna tell me why your robot deity dragged me out of my apartment at 8:30 this morning to watch you and some computer chick make eyes at each other?”  
  
Before Finch can respond, Bear barrels towards them, nearly knocking Shaw over. She sinks to the ground at the bottom of the stairs, ruffling his fur and laughing when he tries to climb into her lap.  
  
She’s missed this.  
  
His nose is in her hair, sniffing, and it’s good and pure and he’s the best dog in the universe, hands down. Shaw thinks that this might be the most content she’s felt since the Stock Exchange. Maybe even before that.  
  
Finch walks past them and into the subway car, like he doesn’t want to interrupt. Shaw can hear him tap-tap-tapping away at his computer and she sighs. With a scratch behind his ear, she turns Bear’s face to look at her.  
  
“Sorry, buddy. Work to do.”  
  
He whines a little when Shaw stands and makes her way towards Finch. She settles in the train car, sitting on top of one of the hard, plastic seats, her elbows on her knees. Bear plops himself down in his bed and starts working on a big rawhide bone that someone – probably John – left for him.  
  
“Okay, Harold. Spill.”  
  
He spins his chair around slowly.  
  
“What has the Machine told you?”  
  
He says it like he’s been betrayed, like this thing he built to protect all of them wasn’t supposed to protect him when he did something reckless. Shaw wonders if he anticipated this when he created the Machine in the first place, if he could have predicted that it would meddle in his own life, that it would send someone to question his choices, to convince him to change his path.  
  
There is so much about the Machine that Shaw thinks Finch never planned for.  
  
“That you’re going to get yourself killed and that I need to stop it.”  
  
Finch doesn’t say anything, so Shaw adds. “And you know that the Machine is never wrong.”  
  
It’s a reminder or it’s a warning or it’s both. Shaw needs to make him understand that she’s taking this seriously and that he should too, if he knows what’s good for him. She dips a hand in her pocket and feels the syringe tucked safely inside of it. It would be fitting, in a sense, to tranq him and handcuff him to the bench for his own safety. See how he likes being locked up while everyone else runs headfirst into danger.  
  
It’s not a first resort, though, not when she doesn’t know what’s really going on.  
  
“You said something to me. Months ago, before you left.”  
  
_After the Stock Exchange. After Root._  
  
He doesn’t say it, but it’s there. Shaw has spent enough time studying people – their emotions, the things they stay and the things they don’t – to know how to read between the lines, to see what Finch is avoiding.  
  
“You said that we were hiding, merely surviving, and that we owed Ms. Groves something more.”  
  
Shaw nods. Finch continues.  
  
“You were right, Ms. Shaw. We aren’t doing enough.”  
  
When they all come through this and the dust is settled and things are back to normal, Shaw might ask the Machine to replay “You were right” over and over again so she can bask in the momentary glory. Or ask It to give her a copy that she can keep on her phone to play for Finch every time he’s being particularly holier-than-thou and not listening to her.  
  
“We are surviving,” he looks down at Bear, who is still chewing on his rawhide, “but only just.”  
  
He looks up and there’s something in his eyes that Shaw doesn’t think she’s seen before. He looks alive, almost reckless, and for the first time, she thinks that Root’s “death” affected him, too.  
  
_(Root could still be alive repeats over and over in her head like a mantra, like maybe if she thinks it enough times, it’ll be true.)_  
  
“I decided it was time to fight back.”  
  
Finch explains his plan – Beth Bridges, Samaritan’s interest in her computer stuff, the Trojan horse that Finch is going to activate – and it’s almost a perfect plan. He’s been playing the long game, crafting something simple enough to execute but clever enough to get the job done and it would be brilliant if it wasn’t so damn stupid.  
  
She has half a mind to let him go through with it. If it takes down Samaritan, then maybe it would be worth it, and isn’t it Finch’s choice whether to risk his own life? But she has orders from the Machine, and Shaw has always been a good soldier.  
  
The needle slides easily into Harold’s neck and Shaw eases him down to the floor as he loses consciousness.  
  
“Sorry, Harold.”  
  
She’s not that sorry.

  
\---

  
She’s sorry later, when she thinks more about his plan, about what it could mean, and about what she’s giving up to do what the Machine has asked of her. It’s a perfectly good plan, the only solid plan any of them have come up with, and it’s probably better than sitting around doing nothing.  
  
Surveillance is one thing – it’s useful and tactical and she would get there eventually, she and Grice – but the trigger in her pocket would be immediate action, a way to get to Samaritan quickly, to get to Root or Greer. It comes at a cost, but everything does, and who is the Machine to say who lives and who dies?  
  
Finch, for his part, doesn’t do anything to alleviate her inner turmoil.  
  
“Have you stopped to consider that this plan could destroy Samaritan, could bring Root home if she is still alive?”  
  
He’s tethered to the bench and he’s angry and of course Shaw has considered that, of course she has. But there’s no guarantee that Root is even alive or that Finch’s plan would work, especially without Finch to decode whatever Samaritan DNA they’d receive.  
  
“Have you stopped to consider that Root would kick my ass if I let you get yourself killed on some off-chance we could get some dirt on Samaritan?”  
  
Finch lowers his voice. “It’s more than an off-chance, and it’s more than getting some dirt, Ms. Shaw.”  
  
Shaw knows. She doesn’t say anything.  
  
“Ms. Groves – Root – wanted Samaritan to fall. Shouldn’t we honor her memory and do that for her, if we can?”  
  
Root wanted Samaritan dead, but Root also wanted Finch alive, and Shaw can’t imagine Root going along with what Finch is suggesting.  
  
There are things she should say but doesn’t know how, things about Finch being important to the Machine, to the team, to Root. Even to her because yeah, she cares too, about all of them and how the hell did that happen?  
  
What she does say is: “It’s not practical. We need you on the ground. You’re our only tech support these days,” and she hopes he understands.   
  
\---

  
Grice looks out over the edge of the rooftop, his hand on his forehead, blocking the rising sun.  
  
“If we set up here, we’ve got a good line of sight into her studio.”  
  
Shaw stands beside him, bringing the scope of her sniper rifle up to her eye. She’s got a clear view into a well-decorated room with a piano, a couple of music stands, and a wall of books that would make Finch jealous.  
  
Their newest Samaritan target is an old lady, 60s, who teaches voice lessons out of a building in Astoria. From what the bugs they planted in her Samaritan-sanctioned, off-the-grid apartment have revealed, she’s got three cats, no children, a Glock in her nightstand, and ties to at least two of Samaritan’s go-to hitmen. She’s not a front-line fighter but she’s a coordinator, as far as Shaw can tell, a contractor of sorts.   
  
“Too bad Research doesn’t give its people day jobs in the shadow zone, too, so we could install a couple of cameras and be done with it.”  
  
Shaw rolls her eyes. “Where’s the fun in that?”  
  
It’s been nice, in a way, to get back to good, old-fashioned intelligence gathering. Not that she doesn’t appreciate the Machine or what it does, but she’ll probably always be more comfortable with this kind of leg work. On the ground, in the trenches, relying on her instincts.  
  
They set up quickly, rifle and binoculars and lawn chairs. Like hell is she sitting on the hard concrete for six hours, or however long it’s going to take to figure out who the old lady is seeing, which agents she’s handling.  
  
Maybe they’ll get lucky and the next warbling songbird will be Martine or that punk Lambert.  
  
Shaw can only dream.  
  
They sit in silence for a couple of minutes, while Old Lady putters around waiting for her first appointment of the day.  
  
“Everything go okay with your old boss?”  
  
She came back from the subway last night after another argument with Finch, and kicked Grice out of her living room/makeshift office with some grumbled comment about her old boss being a stubborn asshole.  
  
Shaw slips her hand into her jacket pocket, making sure that the activation device to Finch’s virus is still there. If Finch feels like he needs to go and get himself killed in order to defeat Samaritan or absolve his Root-guilt or whatever, then fine. But he’s going to have to find another way to do it.  
  
“Yeah. Guy has a hero complex that was going to get him killed.”  
  
When John got back, Shaw gave him the keys to Finch’s handcuffs, briefed him on the Beth Bridges thing, and peaced out. She had three solid days of Finch driving her up a fucking wall, three days of the Machine humming in the background, churning out numbers but never saying a thing about Root. By the end of the third day, Shaw was beyond done.  
  
“Gee, I don’t know anyone like that.”  
  
His voice drips with sarcasm and Shaw glares.   
  
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”  
  
Grice doesn’t look nearly intimidated enough. He’s fucking smiling.  
  
“You kissed your girl, tried to take a bunch of bullets for her, and only failed because she’s got just as much of a hero thing as you do.”  
  
Some days, she really regrets showing him the video footage from the Stock Exchange. It was for research, to show him the faces of the Samaritan perps they’re looking for, that’s all. It had absolutely nothing to do with wanting to look at Root and counting the bullets again, to watch her body twist and turn and to calculate for the hundredth time her chances of survival.   
  
“Root’s not my girl.”  
  
It’s the only thing she can think of to say, and even she’s not buying it.  
  
From the look on his face, Grice isn’t either.  
  
She should’ve just punched Root and let her fall to the ground while Shaw pushed that stupid button. No kissing, no distractions, no opportunity for Root to fuck it up. One punch, and this whole thing would be different. Root would be safe.  
  
She justified the kiss in the days immediately after by saying that it had been for Root, that Shaw had been giving Root something to remember her by, giving her something that Root has wanted since almost the beginning. It was easier to think that way, to cloak her actions in selflessness.  
  
The kiss was for Root, sure, but it was for Shaw, too. Shaw indulged herself in one moment of sentimentality, a moment of “what if?” What if they weren’t all going to die in this war with Samaritan? What if Shaw were capable of feeling as deeply as Root does? What if it could be possible for Shaw to love someone, if only for the few seconds it took to kiss Root before Shaw ran to her death?  
  
Kissing Root was selfish and sentimental and stupid, and now Root is the one paying for it.  
  
Punching Root would have been so much smarter.  
  
Of course, kissing her would’ve been fine and perfectly effective if Root hadn’t gotten one up on her, and Shaw isn’t really sure who she should blame for that one – Root or herself.  
  
“Caring about somebody won’t ruin your street cred, Shaw.”  
  
Grice peers through his binoculars instead of looking at her.  
  
“Doesn’t matter. She’s probably dead anyway.”  
  
Shaw shrugs and picks up her own binoculars, pointing them towards Old Lady’s window. There’s a student in there, some kid who looks like he can’t be more than 10. No parent that Shaw can see, but she’s sure the stage mom must be there somewhere, probably waiting outside the door for her baby to learn enough to hit the big time.  
  
“You don’t believe that.”  
  
She doesn’t say anything. He’s right, but acknowledging it feels like more than Shaw wants to deal with right now.  
  
“She’s lucky to have you, Shaw.”  
  
Shaw is considering her response – she needs to shut him up because this conversation is beyond pointless – when the text comes in.  
  
_Threat to Analog Interface._  
  
Root is alive.  
  
Root is in danger.  
  
The Machine knows where Root is and hasn’t told Shaw until now.  
  
The Machine is an asshole.  
  
Root is _alive._  
  
She turns around, looking for a surveillance camera to talk to before she remembers that they picked this building because its surveillance was out, because it was a safe place to hide from Samaritan.  
  
She looks at her phone and talks to it instead.  
  
“Where is she?”  
  
Grice looks up from his binoculars. “Shaw?”  
  
“Where the fuck is she?”  
  
Her maps app pops open, directions populating, and Shaw can’t help the grin that spreads across her face.  
  
She turns around to face Grice. “Grab your shit, we need to go.”  
  
To his credit, he doesn’t ask why. He grabs the sniper rifle, his extra clips, and he’s behind Shaw, ready for her to lead the way.  
  
_Root is alive, Root is alive, Root is alive._  
  
She presses Reese’s name on her speed dial.  
  
Shaw thunders down the stairs as the phone rings.  
  
He picks up.  
  
“I’m going to text you an address. Get Finch and Fusco and meet me there as soon as you can.”  
  
John knows. “It’s Root. You found her.”  
  
Shaw’s smile is wide and her heart is racing and she wonders if this is what happiness feels like.  
  
“Yeah, John. We found her.”  
  
\---  
  
Shaw’s happiness is short-lived.  
  
Finch is a fucking buzzkill.  
  
“You absolutely cannot go in there, Ms. Shaw. That place will be crawling with Samaritan operatives and your cover is still blown.”   
  
They’re all crammed into Fusco’s car, sitting behind the building, trying to figure out the best plan to get Root out without anybody getting dead. Finch sits in the front seat and looks back at Shaw like he pities her.  
  
“I don’t care. She’s been in there for five months, Finch, because you and the Machine gave up on her. I’m not letting them have another five minutes with her.”  
  
Shaw reaches between herself and Reese to unbuckle her seatbelt. She’s in the middle seat, between him and Grice, and she takes a moment to calculate her chances of getting to a door without one of them stopping her. They’re not great.  
  
“We will find a way to get Ms. Groves out, but it is imperative that we keep you safe as well. For her sake.”  
  
And yeah, Root would probably flip out if something happened to Shaw, but that seems to unimportant in the face of this, of Root being in danger. She’d risk her own life a thousand times if it meant keeping Root safe.  
  
John looks at her, and Shaw thinks that if she were someone else, a number or maybe Fusco, John would put a hand on her wrist, try to comfort her that way. But she isn’t someone else, so he doesn’t touch her, and she’s pretty lucky that he knows her as well as he does.  
  
“Look, Shaw. We’re going to save her. We just need to figure out how. The second you step foot in there, Samaritan is going to be all over us and we won’t be able to get within a hundred yards of Root.”  
  
He’s right and this whole thing fucking sucks.  
  
Shaw looks at her phone. “Where is she?”  
  
The Machine may not be able to see inside the building – from what Finch could tell, it’s full of closed-circuit cameras that are Samaritan-access-only – but Root’s cochlear implants lets the Machine access her location information. When Shaw first got the text, Root was in room 904.  
  
_Operating bay 2._  
  
Shit.  
  
John sees the text and opens the car door. He’s tired of sitting around too, apparently. He looks over Shaw’s head.  
  
“Grice, with me. We’ll take Finch to the asylum and check him in, say he’s some nutjob I arrested that’s relevant to national security. Then we’ll go and find Root.”  
  
Grice nods and gets out of the car with a sympathetic glance at Shaw.  
  
“Shaw, you stay in the car and get ready to play getaway driver.”  
  
Fusco huffs indignantly. “What am I, chopped liver?”  
  
John smirks. “Fusco, your job is to make sure Shaw does not enter that building.”  
  
“Oh great.”  
  
Shaw looks down at her phone, waiting.  
  
_Probability of mission success: 48.73%. Best available option._  
  
John is still sitting there with the car door open, not moving. Waiting for her. She thinks about arguing, about claiming that her medical expertise makes her necessary if Root is in some operating room, but the Machine says that this is their best chance and, for all of the shit it’s fucked up, Shaw still trusts the Machine.  
  
“Fine. Go.”  
  
John, Grice, and Finch pile out of the car.  
  
“Ms. Shaw.” Finch pauses and looks back at her through the open window. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you sooner.”  
  
It’s awkward and Shaw nods because she doesn’t know what else to do. “Just bring her back, Finch.”  
  
He looks like he wants to say something, to make promises he can’t keep, but he keeps his mouth closed, turns, and walks toward the building.  
  
John and Grice follow him, and then they’re out of sight.  
  
She and Fusco rearrange themselves so that Shaw is in the driver’s seat and Fusco in the passenger, ready to make a quick getaway when the others get back. Fusco keeps looking at her out of the corner of his eye, like he’s waiting for her to try to make a break for it.  
  
It’s a fair assessment, really, because the impulse to move, to fight, to help is still so strong. But she’s a good solider, she’s always been a good soldier, and she knows what she risks if she disobeys orders and enters the fray.  
  
The silence in the car is almost deafening.  
  
She checks in with the Machine again.  
  
“Location?”  
  
_Operating bay 2._  
  
She shoves her phone back into her pocket because this is ridiculous. It’s been three minutes max since the guys would’ve gotten to the front of the hospital, and there’s no way they’d be even close to rescuing Root at this point. She needs to get a fucking grip.  
  
“Any change?”  
  
Lionel looks concerned, but Shaw can’t tell if he’s worried about Root or if he’s worried about _her_ and she’s not sure she’s comfortable with it either way.  
  
“No.”  
  
Root is on some operating table, with Samaritan operatives digging around in her heart or her brain or whatever. Root is being tortured or dissected or manipulated. Maybe they’ve found her implant, maybe they’re putting in one of those mind-control chips she and John found in Maple, maybe they’re trying to hurt her badly enough to make her talk, to give up the Machine.  
  
It’s laughable, almost, the idea of Root breaking for Samaritan. If she knows anything about Root, it’s that she’s loyal to the Machine, that she’ll die before she betrays it.  
  
Shaw can’t dwell on it too much, on what Samaritan is doing to Root, on the possibilities. Root is in there going through god-knows-what, Shaw is stuck in this car, and there’s nothing she can do about it.  
  
Later, though, when Root is safe and healed and home, Shaw will come back to this place and burn it to the ground. Maybe they’ll do it together, guns and bombs and fire until this building and everyone in it are nothing more than piles of ash.  
  
She latches onto the anger. It’s familiar and it’s easy and she may not know how to do worried or afraid, but she knows how to do pissed off. Greer and Martine and whoever else is involved, Shaw will make them pay for whatever it is they’ve done.  
  
“Look, Reese is pretty good about keeping his promises. If he says they’ll get Root back, they’ll get her back.”  
  
“They better.”  
  
She’ll give them half an hour. If they’re not out by then, something’s gone sideways and she’s heading in to kick somebody’s ass.  
  
It’s quiet for another couple of minutes. Shaw resists the urge to ask the Machine for an update.  
  
“So.” Fusco is doing that thing that he does on stakeouts where he tries to make small talk and fails miserably. “You and Cocoa Puffs, huh?”  
  
“It’s not a thing, Lionel.”  
  
“It looked like a thing from where I was standing.”  
  
Shaw was supposed to die. She wasn’t supposed to live long enough to suffer through this conversation.  
  
“Root loves you.”  
  
And he’s serious this time, the humor gone from his voice as he looks her dead in the face.  
  
“No shit.”  
  
She thinks about _people who care for you_ and _sounds cozy_ and Root’s stupid face, looking up at her from the floor of the Stock Exchange like dying for Shaw was some kind of privilege. Root might be the least subtle person on the planet, and Shaw isn’t sure if it’s endearing or annoying or maybe both.  
  
“I think you love her, too.”  
  
She smirks. “Did you forget, Lionel? I’m a sociopath; I don’t do feelings.”  
  
Fusco shifts so that his body is angled in her direction and he’s looking straight at her like he’s got something important to say and like he’s a little afraid that she might punch him for saying it.  
  
“The way I see it, feelings are only part of loving somebody. There’s the feelings, and then there’s the decisions, you know?”  
  
Shaw doesn’t know.  
  
“Like. You got the guys who fall in love with a different woman every ten minutes, right? The second the crazy love stuff disappears, they’re outta there because they don’t get that it’s a choice, too, that you gotta choose to love somebody every day.”  
  
“What’s your point, Lionel?”  
  
He shrugs.  
  
“Nothing. Just… for two people who don’t have a thing, you guys seem to choose each other a lot.”  
  
She thinks about it for a second. He’s not wrong.  
  
But really, Fusco’s a divorced single parent who hasn’t had a date since that wingman number, so what the hell does he know?  
  
What Shaw knows is that Root is annoying and she’s overzealous and she’s way too dedicated to a Machine that can never love her the way she loves it, but she’s also loyal and smart and she’s never tried to change Shaw, which should count for something.  
  
Root is important, and maybe that means something, maybe it doesn’t. Right now, that doesn’t matter. Right now, all that matters is getting her out of that damn building.  
  
She pulls her phone out of her pocket and checks the time. It’s been 18 minutes.  
  
She taps her earpiece. “How’s it going, boys?”  
  
Reese answers. “Finch hacked the hospital database. Looks like she’s being held in room 904 but was transported to an operating bay on the fourth floor about three and a half hours ago. That’s probably when you got the text from the Machine.”  
  
“What kind of procedure?”  
  
“Doesn’t say. According to the nurse that Grice knocked out, they should be sewing her up in a few and bringing her to recovery. We figure we’ll interrupt transport and take it from there.”  
  
Moving someone immediately post-op is a terrible plan, especially since Samaritan won’t let them go willingly.  
  
“Be careful not to move her too much. Depending on what kind of procedure –“  
  
Finch cuts in. “Mr. Reese, we need you over –“  
  
Gunshots ring in her ears and her hand automatically flies to the door handle.  
  
John comes back amidst the gunfire. “Gotta go, Shaw. Stay in the car. We can handle this.”  
  
The line goes dead and Shaw takes her hand away from the door.  
  
John’s been in his fair share of gunfights. So has Grice, if his ISA file is anything to go by. They can handle themselves. But if they’ve been discovered, their chances of saving Root have just plummeted. She needs more information.  
  
She grabs her phone and opens up the text window.  
  
“Root. Where is Root?”  
  
Fusco moves for his handcuffs, clipped to the side of his belt. It’s cute that he thinks he can take her. Or at least that he’s willing to try.  
  
She turns to him. “Don’t worry, Lionel. I’m not going anywhere. Just checking on her.”  
  
It’s a lie, but he lowers his hand anyway.  
  
The phone vibrates in her lap.  
  
_Connection to Analog Interface lost. Core data compromised._  
  
It feels like all of the wind has been knocked out of her.  
  
And then she’s out of her seat and moving towards the trunk, her heart hammering. Connection lost can’t be a good thing.  
  
Lionel comes to her side as she’s taking weapons from the trunk and stashing them every place she can think of. M60 slung across her shoulder, her H&K tucked into her waistband. Backup pieces in her thigh holster, shoulder holster, ankle holster. A grenade and a smoke bomb hanging off her belt loops. She’d take the rocket launcher but it’s too much to carry.  
  
(She tries not to think of Root dead on an operating table – _connection lost, core data compromised._ )  
  
“I’m going in and you’re even more of a moron than usual if you think you can stop me.”  
  
For his part, Fusco looks like he’s pissed as hell that he’s gotten stuck with this detail, with keeping her from going anywhere, but he tries anyway.  
  
He’s not quick enough. Shaw handcuffs him to the door handle on the passenger side and slips the key into her pocket. He looks a little dumbfounded, like he’s not exactly sure how she managed to get one up on him so quickly. Shaw would be pleased if she wasn’t busy figuring out how to get into the hospital without getting caught.  
  
“Sorry, Lionel,” she mutters before turning to examine the back of the building.  
  
Ten floors, six sets of windows per floor, three AC units at the bottom. An OR wouldn’t have windows, so best point of entry might be through the ventilation system.  
  
“What are you doing?”  
  
Fusco’s voice sounds concerned, maybe frustrated, maybe pissed at himself for believing her when she said she wouldn’t leave.  
  
Shaw turns around to face him.  
  
“Making a choice.”  
  
She takes off at a run towards the back of the building, as Fusco’s protests fade into the street noise.  
  
\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one took so long, guys. Life happened and then the election happened and then I cried for like a solid week. But I'm back. Hoping to crank out the last chapters when I'm off work next week. 
> 
> Thanks for sticking with me!

**Author's Note:**

> Following this, there should be three chapters of roughly 10k each and then an epilogue.
> 
> Title from the preamble to the US Constitution.


End file.
